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The earliest language was body language and, since this language is the language of questions, if we limit the questions, and if we only pay attention to or place values on spoken or written language, then we are ruling out a large area of human language.
Paulo FreireLying is the misuse of language. We know that. We need to remember that it works the other way round too. Even with the best intentions, language misused, language used stupidly, carelessly, brutally, language used wrongly, breeds lies, half-truths, confusion. In that sense you can say that grammar is morality. And it is in that sense that I say a writer's first duty is to use language well.
Ursula K. Le GuinThere is something false in this search for a purely feminine writing style. Language, such as it is, is inherited from a masculine society, and it contains many male prejudices. We must rid language of all that. Still, a language is not something created artificially; the proletariat can't use a different language from the bourgeoisie, even if they use it differently, even if from time to time they invent something, technical words or even a kind of worker's slang, which can be very beautiful and very rich. Women can do that as well, enrich their language, clean it up.
Simone de BeauvoirThe advantage of the gypsy language, even though I don't understand it that much, the language is perfect melody. So if you propose the movie the way I do, then the language is just one part of the melody. Orchestrating all inside, and the language is following the meaning of what they say, and it's never the same as written.
Emir KusturicaThe majority of the people of the world today are unsane, not insane, unsane meaning having been exposed to methods of evaluation that have long rendered obsolete, our language in the future will change to a saner language where we have no argument in it, 'can there be such a language?' there is, when engineers talk to each other, it's not subject to interpretation, they use math, they use descriptive systems, if I interpreted what another engineer said in the way I think he meant it: you couldn't build bridges, dams, power transmission lines. The language has to have meaning
Jacque FrescoEveryone knows ladies love Cajuns. It's in our blood and our language is the language of romance." "Your language is the language of bullshit. You're just a couple of good ole boys with pretty faces. Women just ought to know better.
Christine FeehanNature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new word; but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant and universal sense. I wish to learn this language - not that I may know a new grammar, but that I may read the great book which is written in that tongue.
Ralph Waldo EmersonGraphic design is a visual language uniting harmony and balance, color and light, scale and tension, form and content. But it is also an idiomatic language, a language of cues and puns and symbols and allusions, of cultural references and perceptual inferences that challenge both the intellect and the eye.
Jessica HelfandDr. Adler had instructed me to always say whatever I was thinking, but this was difficult for me, for the act of thinking and the act of articulating those thoughts were not synchronous to me, or even necessarily consecutive. I knew that I thought and spoke in the same language and that theoretically there should be no reason why I could not express my thoughts as they occurred or soon thereafter, but the language in which I thought and the language in which I spoke, though both English, often seemed divided by a gap that could not be simultaneously, or even retrospectively, bridged.
Peter CameronThere is language going on out there- the language of the wild. Roars, snorts, trumpets, squeals, whoops, and chirps all have meaning derived over eons of expression... We have yet to become fluent in the language -and music- of the wild.
Boyd NortonWe should replace bilingual education with immersion in English so people learn the common language of the country and they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto.
Newt GingrichLanguage is not a genetic gift, it is a social gift. Learning a new language is becoming a member of the club -the community of speakers of that language.
Frank SmithThe significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world.
Friedrich NietzscheWith all the divisive forces tearing at our country, we need the glue of language to help hold us together. If we want to ensure that all our children have the same opportunities in life, alternative language education should stop and English should be acknowledged once and for all as the official language of the United States.
Bob DoleXML is not a language in the sense of a programming language any more than sketches on a napkin are a language.
Charles SimonyiI love language. It doesn't bother me that its effects are partial. To me that is very sanity-producing. It would be weird if the effects of language were more than partial, if your whole life existed within your texts. That would be much scarier to me than language being an inadequate tool to represent.
Maggie NelsonOne of the series I like is D.M. Cornish's 'Monster Blood Tattoo,' in which he creates a whole language. Kids who are reading that are building a language in their heads. There's no real cognitive difference. I think kids are excited by language, and they're not always given credit for that.
Matthew Tobin AndersonThe language of Christianity is the language of substitution. It is not primarily the language of morals. God is not presented as a mother saying โeat all your vegetablesโ. Instead, Christianity is about a one-sided rescue, that we didnโt want and certainly didnโt deserve, and he did it anyway.
Rod RosenbladtWe hypostatize information into objects. Rearrangement of objects is change in the content of the information; the message has changed. This is a language which we have lost the ability to read. We ourselves are a part of this language; changes in us are changes in the content of the information. We ourselves are information-rich; information enters us, is processed and is then projected outward once more, now in an altered form. We are not aware that we are doing this, that in fact this is all we are doing.
Philip K. DickIn the future, we've forgotten it. It's disappointing to find out that the past is the present is the future. Nobody wants that. And yet, that's what it is. Maybe it's a kind of surrealist move, to use language like "post-racial" - thinking that if you create the language for it, it will happen. I wish it worked that way. But that's not our reality.
Claudia RankineI play with language a great deal in my poems, and I enjoy that. I try to condense language, that is, I try to express complicated but I hope real emotions as simply as possible. But that doesn't mean the poems are simple, just that they are as truthful as I can make them.
Anne StevensonThe question is how to bring a work of imagination out of one language that was just as taken-for-granted by the persons who used it as our language is by ourselves. Nothing strange about it.
Robert FitzgeraldBabies 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.
Charlton LairdWe think in language. The quality of our thoughts and ideas can only be as good as the quality of our language.
George CarlinThe more language is a living operation, the less we are aware of it. Thus it follows from the self-forgetfulness of language that its real being consists in what is said in it.
Hans-Georg GadamerLanguage is an archaeological vehicle... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.
Russell HobanLanguage is the crowning achievement of human beings, and that is something Muslims have always known and revered. We are a literate people whose miracle is a Book from an unlettered man, peace and blessings be upon him, who was the most articulate and eloquent human being who ever lived. We honor our Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, in honoring language that he loved so much and used so well.
Hamza YusufThe violence of language consists in its effort to capture the ineffable and, hence, to destroy it, to seize hold of that which must remain elusive for language to operate as a living thing.
Judith ButlerI culled poetry from odors, sounds, faces, and ordinary events occurring around me. Breezes bulged me as if I were cloth; sounds nicked their marks on my nerves; objects made impressions on my sight as if in clay. There, in the soft language, life centered and ground itself in me and I was flowing with the grain of the universe. Language placed my life experiences in a new context, freeing me for the moment to become with air as air, with clouds as clouds, from which new associations arose to engage me in present life in a more purposeful way.
Jimmy Santiago BacaThere is no doubt about it: we are judged by our language as much as (perhaps more than) we are judged by our appearance, our choice of associates, our behavior. Language communicates so much more than ideas; it reveals our intelligence, our knowledge of a topic, our creativity, our ability to think, our self-confidence, et cetera.
Marlene CaroselliIt is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought.
Ludwig WittgensteinMuch more of the brain is devoted to movement than to language. Language is only a little thing sitting on top of this huge ocean of movement.
Oliver SacksExperiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.
Robert MenziesConcerned to reconstruct past ideas, historians must approach the generation that held them as the anthropologist approaches an alien culture. They must, that is, be prepared at the start to find that natives speak a different language and map experience into different categories from those they themselves bring from home. And they must take as their object the discovery of those categories and the assimilation of the corresponding language.
Thomas KuhnWe're very concerned with language and how language works. We're trying to engage people rather than dictate how they should be thinking.
Neville BrodyA basic language-literacy of Nature is falling from us. And what is being lost along with this literacy is something perhaps even more valuable: a kind of language-magic, the power that certain words possess to enchant our imaginative relations with Nature and landscape.
Robert MacfarlaneThe being level speaks the language of art, music, color shape and pattern directly -- a language that requires no words -- is not limited by words -- nor does it have the specificity of words and thus cannot be broken onto parts that can be manipulated or analyzed by the intellect. It must be swallowed, whole not parsed, sorted and justified.
Thomas CampbellI will never stop working on Spanish-language projects because that's my language, and because I'm a Latina and Mexican before anything else.
Kate del CastilloIf prose can cast a spell, we will listen to it no matter what it's saying. If a narrative uses language in a magical and enlivening way, we will listen to the story. But if the language doesn't cast a spell, we will listen to it only if it is telling us something that actually happened.
Lorrie MooreThe poet, by composing poems, uses a language that is neither dead nor living, that few people speak, and few people understand We are the servants of an unknown force that lives within us, manipulates us, and dictates this language to us.
Jean Cocteau