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Quotation of the day
Tuesday, 8 July 2008
Daily Quote:
"There is a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue." (Burke, Edmund - Tolerance)

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

A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas.
A mind enclosed in language is in prison.
A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.
After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?
All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.
All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.
An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.
And who in time knows whither we may vent the treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores this gain of our best glories shall be sent, 't unknowing Nations with our stores? What worlds in the yet unformed Occident may come refined with the accents that are ours?
Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are prefabricated in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak.
As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.
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
As the language of the face is universal, so 'tis very comprehensive; no laconism can reach it: 'Tis the short hand of the mind, and crowds a great deal in a little room
Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.
Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.
Drawing on my fine command of the language, I said nothing.


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