Language Quotes

The flip side of the coin was that even good programmers and language designers tended to do terrible extensions when they were in the heat of programming, because design is something that is best done slowly and carefully.

I knew that I would speak in the language of the vanquished No more durable than old customs, family rituals, Christmas tinsel, and once a year the hilarity of carols.

Thus, while I thought myself employed only in forming a Nomenclature, and while I proposed to myself nothing more than to improve the chemical language, my work transformed itself by degrees, without my being able to prevent it, into a treatise upon the Elements of Chemistry.

I guess we all understand the love language fine; but maybe truth is we’re just too fluent in goodbyes.

The dictionary is based on the hypothesis — obviously an unproven one — that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms.

I’m learning Cuban. It’s like Spanish, but with fewer words for luxury items.

Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.

Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.

I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.

As ideas are preserved and communicated by means of words, it necessarily follows that we cannot improve the language of any science, without at the same time improving the science itself; neither can we, on the other hand, improve a science without improving the language or nomenclature which belongs to it.