Quotes Matter

Language is a virus from outer space. - William S Burroughs

A riot is the language of the unheard. - Martin Luther King, Jr.

Music is the universal language of mankind. - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Speech was given to man to disguise his thoughts. - Charles de Talleyrand

The English contribution to world cuisine. The chip. - John Cleese

Language exerts hidden power, like a moon on the tides. - Rita Mae Brown

Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing. - Robert Benchley

The art of communication is the language of leadership. - James Humes

The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech. - Clifton Fadiman

All poetry is a reproduction of the tones of actual speech. - Robert Frost

We need a president who's fluent in at least one language. - Buck Henry

I respect a man who knows how to spell a word more than one way. - Mark Twain

Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people. - William Butler Yeats

England and America are two countries separated by a common language. - George Bernard Shaw

When I quote others I do so in order to express my own ideas more clearly. - Michel de Montaigne

It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech. - Mark Twain

Out of suffering comes creativity. You cannot spell painting without pain. - John Lithgow

I don't care what you say about me. Just be sure to spell my name wrong. - Barbra Streisand

Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. - Thomas Carlyle

A bore is one who has the power of speech but not the capacity for conversation. - Benjamin Desraeli

I personally think we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain. - Jane Wagner

Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson: you find the present tense, but the past perfect. - Owens L. Pomeroy

Speak when you're angry and you'll make the best speech you'll ever regret. - L.J. Peter

At no time is freedom of speech more precious than when a man hits his thumb with a hammer. - Marshall Lumsden

If we do not believe in freedom of speech for those we despise, we do not believe in it at all. - Noam Chomsky

Give me a few lines of a man's handwriting; that will be sufficient for me to get him hanged. - Cardinal Richelieu

German is the most extravagantly ugly language - it sounds like someone using a sick bag on a 747. - Willy Rushton

Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife. - Kahlil Gibran

Fashion is free speech, and one of the privileges, if not always one of the pleasures, of a free world. - Alison Lurie

Although he tortures the English language, he has not yet succeeded in forcing it to reveal its meaning. - J B Morton

The names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful. - A.S. Byatt

The trouble with quotes about death is that 99.999 percent of them are made by people who are still alive. - Joshua Bruns

Violence of language leads to violence of action. Angry men seldom fight if their tongues do not lead the fray. - Charles V Roman

To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker. - Frederick Douglass

Language, identity, place, home: these are all of a piece - just different elements of belonging and not-belonging. - Jhumpa Lahiri

Two may talk together under the same roof for many years, yet never really meet; and two others at first speech are old friends. - Mary Catherwood

It is Ireland's sacred duty to send over, every few years, a playwright to save the English theatre from inarticulate glumness. - Kenneth Tynan

Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn't mean anything else. - C S Lewis

I can remember a reporter asking me for a quote, and I didn't know what a quote was. I thought it was some kind of a soft drink. - Joe DiMaggio

Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe