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.

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.

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.

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.

Jazz was formerly a crude term for indulging in an action which in polite society is referred to, if at all, only with such vague Latin terms as intercourse and cohabitation.

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

Grammar is not a set of rules; it is something inherent in the language, and language cannot exist without it. It can be discovered, but not invented.