20th-century Linguist Quotes

That is a complete waste of your time and the government's money. You are a native speaker of English; in ten minutes you can produce more illustrations of any point in English grammar than you will find in many millions of words of random text.

Today's practicality is often no more than the accepted form of yesterday's theory.

Kenneth Lee Pike

Word meanings are like stretchy pullovers, whose outline contour is visible, but whose detailed shape varies with use.

Science is fundamentally a moral enterprise, following the moral imperative to seek the truth.

I'm such a jerk; it had never occurred to me that when we look at a photo from the front, the eyes reproduce exactly the position and the vision of the lens; it's these things that are taken for granted and it never occurs to anyone to think about them.

Julio Cortázar

Who wants to be a linguist must apply consistently linguistic criteria, not tinkering to comply with policy needs, creating the illusion that one stands still in the field of science.

Snježana Kordić

William Carlos Williams, late in his long life, had a dream: He saw an enormous spiral staircase in empty space, and his father slowly descending toward him. When he reached the bottom, his father walked over, looked him in the eye and said: You know those poems you're writing? They're no good.

Eliot Weinberger

There are only two reasons for buying a book, after all. Either we intend to read it, in which case most of us find a printed version preferable, or we don't intend to read it, in which case a printed version is absolutely essential.

Geoffrey Nunberg