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| We should have a great fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves. ~ John Locke |
| Language forces us to perceive the world as man presents it to us. ~ Julia Penelope |
| The quantity of consonants in the English language is constant. If omitted in one place, they turn up in another. When a Bostonian "pahks" his "cah," the lost r’s migrate southwest, causing a Texan to "warsh" his car and invest in "erl wells." ~ Author Unknown |
| English is a funny language; that explains why we park our car on the driveway and drive our car on the parkway. ~ Author Unknown |
| The reaction to any word may be, in an individual, either a mob-reaction or an individual reaction. It is up to the individual to ask himself: Is my reaction individual, or am I merely reacting from my mob-self? When it comes to the so-called obscene words, I should say that hardly one person in a million escapes mob-reaction. ~ D.H. Lawrence |
| Lymph, v.: to walk with a lisp. ~ From a |
| No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous. ~ Henry Brooks Adams, |
| One man’s frankness is another man’s vulgarity. ~ Kevin Smith |
| I personally believe we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain. ~ Jane Wagner |
| Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne. ~ Quentin Crisp |
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| Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work. ~ Carl Sandburg, |
| It’s a strange world of language in which skating on thin ice can get you into hot water. ~ Franklin P. Jones |
| In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer. ~ Mark Twain |
| At no time is freedom of speech more precious than when a man hits his thumb with a hammer. ~ Marshall Lumsden |
| What words say does not last. The words last. Because words are always the same, and what they say is never the same. ~ Antonio Porchia, |
| Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes |
| We have too many high sounding words and too few actions that correspond with them. ~ Abigail Adams |
| Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson |
| A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years. ~ Wendell L. Willkie |
| Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions. ~ Edward R. Murrow |
| If you can speak three languages you’re trilingual. If you can speak two languages you’re bilingual. If you can speak only one language you’re an American. ~ Author Unknown |
| Sometimes it’s just a short swim from the shipwreck of your life to the island paradise of your dreams – assuming you don’t drown in the metaphor. ~ Robert Brault |
| I like the word "indolence." It makes my laziness seem classy. ~ Bern Williams |
| Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true. ~ Samuel Johnson |
| Words signify man’s refusal to accept the world as it is. ~ Walter Kaufmann |
| The English language is nobody’s special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself. ~ Derek Walcott |
| Language is the dress of thought. ~ Samuel Johnson |
| Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons. ~ Aldous Huxley |
| The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand. ~ Lewis Thomas |
| Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought. ~ William James |