Language

Our common language is ... English. And our common task is to ensure that our non-English-speaking children learn this common language.
~ William John Bennett, in The New York Times (26 September 1985).

You can say the right thing about a product and nobody will listen. You've got to say it in such a way that people will feel it in their gut. Because if they don't feel it, nothing will happen.
~ Bill Bernbach

Careful and correct use of language is a powerful aid to straight thinking, for putting into words precisely what we mean necessitates getting our own minds quite clear on what we mean.
~ William Ian Beardmore (W.I.B.) Beveridge, The Art of Scientific Investigation (1950).

English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminology are based on Latin -- a language with which it has precious little in common. In Latin, to take one example, it is not possible to split an infinitive. So in English, the early authorities decided, it should not be possible to split an infinitive either. But there is no reason why we shouldn't, any more than we should forsake instant coffee and air travel because they weren't available to the Romans. Making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football. It is a patent absurdity. But once this insane notion became established, grammarians found themselves having to draw up ever more complicated and circular arguments to accommodate the inconsistencies.
~ Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way (1990).

Language is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines.
~ Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way (1990).

More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.
~ Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way (1990).

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

[O]ur English tongue is, I will not say, as sacred as the Hebrew or as learned as the Greek; but as fluent as the Latin, as courteous as the Spanish, as court-like as the French, and as amourous as the Italian.
~ William Camden, Remaines of a Greater Worke, Concerning Britaine (1605).

A quotation, like a pun, should come unsought, and then be welcomed only for some propriety of felicity justifying the intrusion.
~ Robert William Chapman

A good linguist is always a man of considerable acuteness, and often of pre-eminent taste.
~ William Benton (W.B.) Clulow

Language is properly the servant of thought, but not unfrequently becomes its master.
~ William Benton (W.B.) Clulow, Horæ otiosæ; or, Thoughts, Maxims, and Opinions (1833). Part IV. On Authors, Style, and Literature

When words are put together in fresh ways there is a pleasure-giving quality in language, which brings a release of endorphins.
~ Billy Collins, in The New York Times (30 November 1997).

I know that's a secret, for it's whispered everywhere.
~ William Congreve, Love for Love (1695). Act III, scene 3

Thou art a retailer of phrases, and dost deal in remnants of remnants.
~ William Congreve, The Way of the World (1700). Act IV, scene ix

They're standing on the corner and they can't speak English. I can't even talk the way these people talk: "Why you ain't," "Where you is?" ... I blamed the kid, until I heard the mother talk. ... And then I heard the father talk. Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth!
~ Bill Cosby, Remarks at NAACP Legal Defense Fund Event on the 50th Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. Washington, D.C. (17 May 2004).

And, of all lies (be that one poet's boast)
The lie that flatters I abhor the most.
~ William Cowper, from Poems by William Cowper of the Inner Temple, Esq. (1782). Table Talk (written in 1781)

The harsh language of an angry man is the mere scum of his soul.
~ William Scott Downey, Proverbs, by Rev. William Scott Downey (1858 edition).

Flattery must be pretty thick before anybody objects to it.
~ William Feather, The Business of Life (1949).

With reasonable men, I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost.
~ William Lloyd Garrison, in William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879: The Story Of His Life Told By His Children, Volume I (1885). Chapter VII: Baltimore Jail, and After--1830

English is such a deliciously complex and undisciplined language; we can bend, fuse, distort words to all our purposes. We give old words new meanings, and we borrow new words from any language that instrudes into our intellectual environment.
~ Willard "Will" Gaylin

Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye.
~ William Gibson, The Miracle Worker (1957).

The deadliest bullshit is odorless and transparent.
~ William Gibson

[H]e uses language that would make your hair curl.
~ William Schwenck (W.S.) Gilbert, Ruddigore; or, The Witch's Curse (1887 opera). Act I

The meaning doesn't matter if it's only idle chatter of a transcendental kind.
~ William Schwenck (W.S.) Gilbert, Patience: Or, Bunthorne's Bride (1881 opera).

When you're lying awake with a dismal headache, and repose is taboo'd by anxiety,
I conceive you may use any language you choose to indulge in, without impropriety.
~ William Schwenck (W.S.) Gilbert, Iolanthe (1882 opera).

Lost in amaze at the language so divine,
The audience hiccup, and exclaim, "Damn'd fine!"
~ William Gifford, The Baviad (1791).

Language, like light, is a medium: and the true philosophic style, like light from a north window, exhibits objects clearly, and distinctly, without soliciting attention to itself.
~ (Reverend) William Gilpin, from Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and On Sketching Landscape (1792). Essay I

'Tis the everyday Australian
Has a language of his own,
Has a language, or a slanguage,
Which can simply stand alone.
~ William Thomas "W.T." Goodge, in Bulletin (4 June 1898). The Australian Slanguage

The greatest form of praise is the sound of consecrated feet seeking out the lost and helpless.
~ Billy Graham

Comics is a language. It's a language most people understand intuitively. If cartoonists use a large and varied "vocabulary" to entertain their readers, those readers will usually come along for the ride.
~ William Henry Jackson (Bill) Griffith, Boston Globe (10 November 1996).

Language is the attribution of signs to our cognitions of things. But as a cognition must have been already there, before it could receive a sign; consequently, that knowledge which is denoted by the formation and application of a word, must have preceded the symbol which denotes it. Speech is thus not the mother, but the grandmother, of knowledge.
~ Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet, Logic (1833).

Language, if it throws a veil over our ideas, adds a softness and refinement to them, like that which the atmosphere gives to naked objects.
~ William Hazlitt, first published in The Examiner (12 February 1815). On Classical Education

Languages happily restrict the mind to what is of its own native growth and fitted for it, as rivers and mountains bond countries; or the empire of learning, as well as states, would become unwieldy and overgrown.
~ William Hazlitt, from The Plain Speaker (1826). On Old English Writers and Speakers

Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself.
~ William Hazlitt, from Lectures on the English Poets (1818). Lecture I. -- Introductory. On Poetry in General

The way to procure insults is to submit to them. A man meets with no more respect than he exacts.
~ William Hazlitt, Characteristics: in the Manner of Rochefoucault's Maxims (1823).

The criticism that damages is that which disparages, dismisses, ridicules, or condemns.
~ William Ernest (W.E.) Henley

Language is quite peculiarly confronted by an unending and truly boundless domain, the totality of all that can be thought. It must therefore make infinite use of finite means, and is able to do so in virtue of the identity of the force that engengers both thought and language.
~ Wilhelm von Humboldt, The Heterogeneity of Language and its Influence on the Intellectual Development of Mankind (1836).

Language is the formative organ of thought.
~ Wilhelm von Humboldt, On Language: the Diversity of Human Language Construction and its Influence on the Mental Development of the Human Species (1856 translation).

Language, more than any other attribute of mankind, binds together the whole human race.
~ Wilhelm von Humboldt, in On the Kawi Language in the Islands of Jave (Ueber die Kawi-Sprache auf der Insel Java, 1836-1840).

Speech must be regarded as naturally inherent in man, for it is altogether inexplicable as a work of his understanding in its simple consciousness. We are none the better for allowing thousands and thousands of years for its invention. There could be no language unless its type already existed in the human understanding.
~ Wilhelm von Humboldt

'Cut that out' is a slang phrase borrowed evidently from doctors.
~ (Col.) William C. Hunter, Brass Tacks (1910).

Make up your mind what you want to say, and then put it into the simplest language you can, that is the secret of good style.
~ William Ralph (Dean) Inge, in Dean Inge (1960).

Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.
~ William James

One half the doubts in life arise from the defects of language.
~ William Johnson (concurring opinion), Gibbons v. Ogden, 22 U.S. 1 (1824).

The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of the verbs and in the forms of the grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.
~ Sir William Jones, The Sanscrit Language (1786).

Grammer, the groud of al.
~ William Langland, A Vision of William Concerning Piers Plowman (or Visio Willelmi de Petro Ploughman; c. 1362).

Let your language be a source of unity but not a separating tool.
~ William Ngwako Maphoto

Archaeology is fascinating to people when it is communicated to them in plain language.
~ William H. Marquardt, in The Chronicle of Higher Education 42, no. 39 (7 June 1996). Unearthing Support for Archaeology

It is good to be on your guard against an Englishman who speaks French perfectly; he is very likely to be a cardsharper or an attache in the diplomatic service.
~ W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up (1938). Chapter 29

It is well to remember that grammar is common speech formulated.
~ W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up (1938).

She plunged into a sea of platitudes, and with the powerful breast stroke of a channel swimmer, made her confident way towards the white cliffs of the obvious.
~ W. Somerset Maugham, from A Writer's Notebook (1949).

Slang is the great pitfall.
~ W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge (1944).

The language is alive and constantly changing.
~ W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up (1938).

I hate careless flattery, the kind that exhausts you in your effort to believe it.
~ Wilson Mizner

It is a curious thing that God learned Greek when he wished to turn author--and that he did not learn it better.
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

In strictness of language, there is a difference between knowledge and wisdom; wisdom always supposing action, and action directed by it.
~ William Paley, Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (1802). Chapter XXIV: Of the Natural Attributes of the Deity

Nothing you can't spell will ever work.
~ Will Rogers

German is the most extravagantly ugly language -- it sounds like someone using a sick bag on a 747.
~ Willy Rushton, Holiday Inn, Ghent (1984)

English is a stretch language; one size fits all.
~ William L. Safire, On Language (1980).

But when I tell him he hates flatterers,
He says he does, being then most flattered.
~ William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

Done to death by slanderous tongue
Was the Hero that here lies.
~ William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing. Act V, scene iii

Even as your horse bears your praises; who would
trot as well, were some of your brags dismounted.
~ William Shakespeare, King Henry V. Act III, scene vii

For we, which now behold these present days,
Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.
~ William Shakespeare, Sonnet 106

He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.
~ William Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost

He that loves to be flattered is worthy o' the flatterer.
~ William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens. Act I, scene i

He was ever precise in promise-keeping.
~ William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure. Act I, scene ii

Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
~ William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor

I will praise any man that will praise me.
~ William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra. Act II, scene vi

Sweet smoke of rhetoric!
~ William Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost. Act III, scene i

They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.
~ William Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost

'Tis not the trial of a woman's war,
The bitter clamour of two eager tongues,
Can arbitrate this cause betwixt us twain.
~ William Shakespeare, King Richard II. Act I, scene i

You taught me language; and my profit on't
Is, I know how to curse.
~ William Shakespeare, The Tempest. Act I, scene ii

Language is the memory of the human race. It is as a thread or nerve of life running through all the ages, connecting them into one common, prolonged and advancing existence.
~ William Henry Smith, Thorndale: Or, The Conflict of Opinions (1857). The Confession Of Faith Of An Eclectic And Utopian Philosopher. Part I. The Development of the Individual Consciousness, Section xi: Progressive Development -- New Knowledge, New Sentiments

I think language does bring us together. Fragile and misleading as it is, it's the best communication we've got, and poetry is language at its most intense and potentially fulfilling. Poems do bring people together.
~ William Stafford, Interview in The Paris Review, Issue 129 (Winter 1993). The Art of Poetry No. 67

It is as if the ordinary language we use every day has a hidden set of signals; a kind of secret code.
~ William Stafford, from Writing the Australian Crawl (1978).

These words that occur to me come out of my relation to the language which is developing even as I am using it.
~ William Stafford

Make definite assertions. Avoid tame, colorless, hesitating, non-committal language.
~ William Strunk, Jr., The Elements of Style (1918). III. Elementary Principles of Composition

A people who are prosperous and happy, optimistic and progressive, will produce much slang. It is a case of play. They amuse themselves with the language.
~ William Graham Sumner, Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals (1906).

When the English language gets in my way, I walk over it.
~ William A. "Billy" Sunday

Mathematics has been and will continue to be the qualitative language of science, but astrology will become the qualitative language of the human condition.
~ William Tiller

I perceived how that it was impossible to establish the lay people in any truth except the Scripture were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue.
~ William Tyndale, on translating the Bible into English (c. 1530).

One cannot always live in the palaces and state apartments of language, but we can refuse to spend our days in searching for its vilest slums.
~ William Watson, Pencraft: A Plea for the Older Ways (1916).

Verbing weirds language.
~ Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes

[E]very language in the gross is an institution, on which scores or hundreds of generations and unnumbered thousands of individual workers have labored.
~ William Dwight Whitney, The Life and Growth of Language: An Outline of Linguistic Science (1875). Nature and Origin of Language

Language may be briefly and comprehensively defined as the means of expression of human thought.
~ William Dwight Whitney, The Life and Growth of Language: An Outline of Linguistic Science (1875).

The whole subject of linguistic investigation may be conveniently summed up in the single inquiry, 'Why do we speak as we do?'
~ William Dwight Whitney, from Language and the Study of Language: Twelve Lectures on the Principles of Linguistic Science (1867). Lecture I

Sometimes I think of it in terms of language. It's like there are all these languages available, especially in terms of image. Why confine yourself to only English? There's all these languages and possibilities and concepts to speak or communicate with them.
~ William T. Wiley, in Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (8 October 1997). Oral history interview with William T. Wiley, 1997 Oct 8-Nov. 20

Hyerbole expands in societies where articulateness atrophies.
~ George F. Will, Simpson Verdict Leaves Debris Of Disturbing Facts (4 October 1995)

While there are but twenty-six letters in the English alphabet there are forty-four elementary sounds in the English language.
~ Lida M. Williams, How to Teach Phonics (1916). Third Year

All categories, including the category "language," are themselves constructions in language, and can thus only with an effort, and within a particular system of thought, be separated from language for relational inquiry.
~ Raymond Henry Williams, Marxism and Literature (1977).

Language is then, positively, a distinctively human opening of and opening to the world: not a distinguishable or instrumental but a constitutive faculty.
~ Raymond Henry Williams, Marxism and Literature (1977).

I can go around talking complete and utter twaddle. I confuse people.
~ Robbie Williams

Debating against him is no fun, say something insulting and he looks at you like a whipped dog.
~ Harold Wilson

Oft on the dappled turf at ease
I sit, and play with similies,
Loose types of things through all degrees.
~ William Wordsworth, from Poems in Two Volumes, Volume II (1807). To the Daisy, Part II

Theirs is the language of the heavens, the power,
The thought, the image, and the silent joy:
Words are but under-agents in their souls.
~ William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850 edition). Book XIII: Imagination and Taste, How Impaired and Restored (Concluded)