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Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.
Paul de Man
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The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.
James Fenimore Cooper
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I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand.
Edward Appleton
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As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language; every human use of words that is joyful, or honest or new, because experience is new... But as a Black poet and writer, I hate words that cancel my name and my history and the freedom of my future: I hate the words that condemn and refuse the language of my people in America.
June Jordan
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As our language wanes and dies, the golden legends of the far-off centuries fade and pass away. No one sees their influence upon culture; no one sees their educational power.
Douglas Hyde
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But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to hope that music may always be transcendental language in the most extravagant sense.
Charles Ives
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Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it.
Andrea Dworkin
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True creativity often starts where language ends.
Arthur Koestler
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While a people preserves its language; it preserves the marks of liberty.
José Rizal
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Whenever one reads of the determination of the species, or opens a book on natural science and history, in whatever language, one inevitably comes across the name of Linne.
Johannes V. Jensen
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From the sons of Ith, the first of the Gael to get his death in Ireland, there came in the after time Fathadh Canaan, that got the sway over the whole world from the rising to the setting sun, and that took hostages of the streams and the birds and the languages.
Augusta, Lady Gregory
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A marvellous power of expression over language often distinguishes genius; but Shakespeare in his phrases seems independent of the bonds of language as of the bonds of metre.
George Edward Woodberry
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The symbolic view of things is a consequence of long absorption in images. Is sign language the real language of Paradise?
Hugo Ball
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Ever since the arrival of printing - thought to be the invention of the devil because it would put false opinions into people's minds - people have been arguing that new technology would have disastrous consequences for language.
David Crystal
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Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.
Roland Barthes
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The problems of language here are really serious. We wish to speak in some way about the structure of the atoms. But we cannot speak about atoms in ordinary language.
Werner Heisenberg
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I personally think we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.
Jane Wagner
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The transition state of manners and language cannot be too often insisted upon: for this affected the process at both ends, giving the artist in fictitious life an uncertain model to copy and unstable materials to work in.
George Saintsbury
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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
Alan Perlis
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To me, the body says what words cannot. I believe that dance was the first art. A philosopher has said that dance and architecture were the first arts. I believe that dance was first because it's gesture, it's communication. That doesn't mean it's telling a story, but it means it's communicating a feeling, a sensation to people.
Dance is the hidden language of the soul, of the body. And it's partly the language that we don't want to show.
Martha Graham
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The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of things.
Giambattista Vico
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The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.
Thornton Wilder
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Neither Aristotelian nor Russellian rules give the exact logic of any expression of ordinary language; for ordinary language has no exact logic.
P. F. Strawson
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Language is an archaeological vehicle... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.
Russell Hoban
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To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.
Roland Barthes
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Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
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