American Linguist Quotes

George Lakoff

Benjamin Lee Whorf

Ann Bannon

Kenneth Lee Pike

Daniel Everett

Charles F. Hockett

M. Carey Thomas

Electronic brains may help us to use our heads but will not excuse us from that duty, and as to our hearts-cardiograms cannot diagnose what may be most ill about them, or confirm what may be best. The faithful woman and the versatile brave man, the wakeful intelligence open to inspiration or grace-these are still exemplary for our kind, as they always were and always will be.

Robert Fitzgerald

Big dictionaries are nothing but storerooms with infrequently visited and dusty corners.

Richard W. Bailey

I have resisted the term sociolinguistics for many years, since it implies that there can be a successful linguistic theory or practice which is not social.

Science and technology contribute to the fast-expanding vocabularies of all living civilized tongues at a faster rate than all other fields of human endeavor put together.

If only there were a lexicographer of Liang Shih-ch'iu's ability who also had the perspicuity to arrange his dictionary by sound rather than radical! … No wonder most of us are so sour and gray by the time we reach fifty! The amount of time consumed and the spirit expended in this sort of meaningless, not to mention destructive, type of activity is beyond calculation.

As a scientist, objectivity is one of my most deeply held values. If we could just try harder, I once thought, surely we could each see the world as others see it and learn to respect one another's views more readily. But I learned from the Pirahas, our expectations, our culture, and our experiences can render even perceptions of the environment nearly incommensurable cross-culturally.

If you behave like a doormat, expect to be stepped on and don't complain about it.

Suzette Haden Elgin

There is no right to punish. There is only the power to punish,' she wrote. 'A man is punished for his crime because the State is stronger than he; the great crime of War is not punished because beyond the individual there is mankind, and beyond mankind there is nothing at all.

As for changes in the world, the most valuable surely is that we need no longer be an island entire unto ourselves. No young gay person is thrown in jail anymore for just the suspicion of homosexual activity.

There is only one type of decadence which is dangerous in art and literature, and unfortunately critics seldom scourge it as it deserves: it consists in being conventional and imitative, in tritely expressing cheap and superficial emotions.

Man does not live on bread alone; his other necessity is communication.

Charles F. Hockett

.. a woman can be a woman and a true one without having all her time engrossed by dress and society.

M. Carey Thomas

The ultimate goal is a comprehensive classification of what is very likely a single language family. The implications of such a classification for the origin and history of our species would, of course, be very great.

Joseph Greenberg

The job of the linguist, like that of the biologist or the botanist, is not to tell us how nature should behave, or what its creations should look like, but to describe those creations in all their messy glory and try to figure out what they can teach us about life, the world, and, especially in the case of linguistics, the workings of the human mind.

When writing a poem, I feel like I'm translating. And when I'm translating, I feel like I'm writing.

It's one thing to make lemonade out of lemons, another to proclaim that
lemons are what you'd hope for in the first place.

The most difficult step in the study of language is the first step.

Leonard Bloomfield

The nomadic Semite... roves as a herdsman, partaking of Allah's hospitality.

Cyrus H. Gordon

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

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

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

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

Kenneth Lee Pike

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.

Why are we so concerned about whether other animals are like human beings or not? Because we are worried about whether we should consider them kinfolk of ours, relatives. If they are relatives of ours, then we should treat them with more respect than if they are not.

My analysis was directed toward purely physical conditions, such as defective wiring, presence of lack of air spaces between metal flues and woodwork, etc., and the results were presented in these terms.

Benjamin Lee Whorf