Amoebas, once they have themselves well pulled in two, go their ways-they practice divorce, but no remarriage.

Babies and language are the essential ingredients of civilization, and speakers of language no more know where it came from than babies know where they come from.

You and I who read and write books have very little effect upon language. We may think about it, write about it, and read about it, but it goes on without us, or in spite of us.

Quite naturally, scholars assumed that Latin grammar was not merely Latin grammar, but that it was grammar itself. They borrowed it and made the most of it.

Civilization could not exist until there was written language, because without written language no generation could bequeath to succeeding generations anything but its simpler findings.

The great arbiters of language are the women who speak it in the presence of children... What the women pass on to the next generation is "right" and what they do not bother to pass on to their children sooner or later becomes "wrong.

If language is intimately related to being human, then when we study language we are, to a remarkable degree, studying human nature.