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Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

I stand and listen to people speaking french in the stores and in the street. It's such a pert, crisp language, elegant as ruffling taffeta.

Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms.

I can remember the lush spring excitement of language in childhood. Sitting in church, rolling it around my mouth like marbles--tabernacle and pharisee and parable, tresspass and Babylon and covenant.

Language helps form the limits of our reality.

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?

For every man there is something in the vocabulary that would stick to him like a second skin. His enemies have only to find it.

Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.

Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.

If language had been the creation not of poetry but of logic, we should only have one.

If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found the time to conquer the world.

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes, and thanks to words, we have sunk to the level of the demons.

Language is memory and metaphor.

All language reflects the prejudices of the society in which it evolved.

Look wise; say nothing and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought.

Spoken language is merely a series of squeaks.

Language is the roadmap of a culture. It tells you where its people came from and where they are going.

Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it.