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It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs. -
Thomas Hardy
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Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about. -
Benjamin Lee Whorf
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How many languages are there in the world? How about 5 billion! Each of us talks, listens, and thinks in his/her own special language that has been shaped by our culture, experiences, profession, personality, mores and attitudes. The chances of us meeting someone else who talks the exact same language is pretty remote. -
unknown
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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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As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests -
Gore Vidal
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We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary. -
Booker T Washington
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A mind enclosed in language is in prison. -
Simone Weil
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There is no such thing as ''the Queen's English.'' The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares! -
Mark Twain
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Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all. -
Walt Whitman
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We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it. -
Benjamin Lee Whorf
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We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language. -
Oscar Wilde
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As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise. -
George F Will
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Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man. -
Martin Heidegger
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If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world. -
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary, and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once. -
Virginia Woolf
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You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence. -
Katherine Anne Porter
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We might hypothetically possess ourselves of every technological resource on the North American continent, but as long as our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be ''revolutionary'' but not transformative. -
Adrienne Rich
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My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets -- no, they're little gifts, containing meanings! -
Philip Roth
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