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Quotation of the day
Wednesday, 3 December 2008
Daily Quote:
"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" (Vidal, Gore - Language)

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Proverb of the Day
All that glitters is not gold.
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Browse Quotations about Words

A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword.
A man says what he knows, a woman says what will please.
A new word is like a fresh seed sewn on the ground of the discussion.
A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words... the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.
A single word often betrays a great design.
A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the word you first thought of.
A thousand words will not leave so deep an impression as one deed.
A wise man hears one word and understands two.
A word carries far -- very far -- deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.
A word from the mouth is like a stone from a sling.
A word is dead when it is said. Some say. I say it just, begins to live that day.
A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.
A word once uttered can never be recalled.
A word too much always defeats its purpose.
Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society.
All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
All our words from loose using have lost their edge.
All words are part true and part false.
All words are pegs to hang ideas on.
Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.
An average English word is four letters and a half. By hard, honest labor I've dug all the large words out of my vocabulary and shaved it down till the average is three and a half... I never write metropolis for seven cents, because I can get the same money for city. I never write policeman, because I can get the same price for cop.... I never write valetudinarian at all, for not even hunger and wretchedness can humble me to the point where I will do a word like that for seven cents; I wouldn't do it for fifteen.
As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language; every human use of words that is joyful, or honest or new, because experience is new... But as a Black poet and writer, I hate words that cancel my name and my history and the freedom of my future: I hate the words that condemn and refuse the language of my people in America.
Be generous with kindly words, especially about those who are absent.
Blessed are they who have nothing to say and who cannot be persuaded to say it.
Bu is a word that cools many a warm impulse, stifles many a kindly thought, puts a dead stop to many a brotherly deed. No one would ever love his neighbor as himself if he listened to all the Buts that could be said.
But words are things, and a small drop of ink, falling like dew, upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.
By words the mind is winged.
Colors fade, temples crumble, empires fall, but wise words endure.
Each group of words is processed by the brain as a single thought. And because the words are viewed in context, you retain them more accurately than if you processed the words individually.
Eating words has never given me indigestion.
Every spoken word arouses our self-will.
For last year's words belong to last year's language and next year's words await another voice.
Gentle words, quiet words, are after all the most powerful words. They are more convincing, more compelling, more prevailing.
Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.
Good words are worth a thousand pictures.
Handle them carefully, for words have more power than atom bombs.
He who seldom speaks, and with one calm well-timed word can strike dumb the loquacious, is a genius or a hero.
How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.
I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company.
I don't give a damn for man that can spell a word only one way.
I find it difficult to believe that words have no meaning in themselves, hard as I try. Habits of a lifetime are not lightly thrown aside.
I have never been hurt by what I have not said.
I have never developed indigestion from eating my words.
I haven't much opinion of words. They're apt to set fire to a dry tongue, that's what I say.
I've been asked to say a couple of words about my husband, Fang. How about short and cheap?
If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?
If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy.
If you wish to know the mind of a man, listen to his words.
In fact, words are well adapted for description and the arousing of emotion, but for many kinds of precise thought other symbols are much better.
In words are seen the state of mind and character and disposition of the speaker.
It is a kind of good deed to say well; and yet words are not deeds.
It is with a word as with an arrow -- once let it loose and it does not return.
It is with words as with sunbeams -- the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.
It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence, whether a man be behind it or no.
Keep your words sweet -- you may have to eat them. I expect to pass through this world but once; any good thing therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any fellow creature, let me do it now; let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.
Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground.
Like an arrow to its mark flies the word good man's word.
Man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that sometimes he has to eat them.
My general theory since 1971 has been that the word is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the word virus (the Other Half) has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute.
No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
Nothing can throw thee into the infernal abyss so much as this detested word -- heed well! -- this mine and thine.
Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what we are given by the senses.
On a single winged word hath hung the destiny of nations.
One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.
One of our defects as a nation is a tendency to use what have been called weasel words. When a weasel sucks eggs the meat is sucked out of the egg. If you use a weasel word after another there is nothing left of the other.
One thing you can give and still keep is your word.
Our expression and our words never coincide, which is why the animals don't understand us.
Our great men have written words of wisdom to be used when hardship must be faced. Life obliges us with hardship so the words of wisdom shouldn't go to waste.
Our lives are fed by kind words and gracious behavior. We are nourished by expressions like excuse me and other such simple courtesies... Rudeness, the absence of the sacrament of consideration, is but another mark that our time-is-money society is lacking in spirituality, if not also in its enjoyment of life.
Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.
Please God, make my words today sweet and tender, for tomorrow I may have to eat them.
Political correctness is simply a speed bump in the traffic of truth, free thought and speech.
Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.
Print is the sharpest and the strongest weapon of our party.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will make me go in a corner and cry by myself for hours.