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English Language Quotes

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English Language Quotes

“The English language may hold a more disagreeable combination of words than "The doctor will see you now." I am willing to concede something to the phrase "Have you anything to say before the current is turned on?" That may be worse for the moment, but it doesn't last so long. For continued, unmitigating depression, I know nothing to equal "The doctor will see you now." But I'm not narrow-minded about it. I'm willing to consider other possibilities.”

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Book:Love Conquers All
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“Once, BBC television had echoed BBC radio in being a haven for standard English pronunciation. Then regional accents came in: a democratic plus. Then slipshod usage came in: an egalitarian minus. By now slovenly grammar is even more rife on the BBC channels than on ITV. In this regard a decline can be clearly charted... If the BBC, once the guardian of the English language, has now become its most implacable enemy, let us at least be grateful when the massacre is carried out with style.”

IfsLanguageEnemyStyleHavensTelevisionStandardsRegardGratefulDemocraticRadioPlusDeclineAccentsBe GratefulGrammarGuardianEnglish LanguageUsageMassacresMinusPronunciationStandard English
Author:Clive James
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“We have room but for one Language here and that is the English Language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans of American nationality and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding-house.”

PeopleAmericaTurnsHouseLanguageRoomsUnited States Of AmericaEnglish LanguageNationalityAllegianceCrucibleDwellersPolyglotsAmerican EnglishBoarding House
Book:Letters: The days of Armageddon, 1909-1914
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“I don't think it is always necessary to take up the anti-colonial -- or is it post-colonial? -- cudgels against English. What seems to me to be happening is that those people who were once colonized by the language are now rapidly remaking it, domesticating it, becoming more and more relaxed about the way they use it -- assisted by the English language's enormous flexibility and size, they are carving out large territories for themselves within its frontiers.”

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Author:Salman Rushdie
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“If there is one sweeping generalization I can make without fear of contradiction, it is that 'change' is the scariest word in the English language Nothing will change in our lives until we change our own behavior. Insight won't do it. Understanding why we do the self-defeating things we do won't make us stop doing them. Nagging and pleading with the other person to change won't do it. We have to act. We have to take the first step down a new road.”

IfsFirstsPersonsI CanSelfLanguageUnderstandingStepsOur LivesBehaviorInsightContradictionFirst StepsEnglish LanguageSweepingGeneralizationPleadingNaggingNew RoadsUnderstanding Why
Author:Susan Forward
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“I remember one English teacher in the eighth grade, Florence Schrack, whose husband also taught at the high school. I thought what she said made sense, and she parsed sentences on the blackboard and gave me, I'd like to think, some sense of English grammar and that there is a grammar, that those commas serve a purpose and that a sentence has a logic, that you can break it down. I've tried not to forget those lessons, and to treat the English language with respect as a kind of intricate tool.”

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Author:John Updike
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“In my early teens, I read every bound volume of the magazine Punch. Every writer of any distinction in the English language, and I mean including America and England, at some time wrote for Punch. Jerome K. Jerome, who wrote Three Men In A Boat, I loved. I was very impressed when I read a piece by Mark Twain in Punch, and realized that despite the fact that they were on different continents, Jerome K. Jerome and Mark Twain had the same kind of laconic, laid-back, "The human race is damn stupid, but quite interesting" attitude. They were almost talking with the same voice.”

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Author:Terry Pratchett
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“There are some people that aren't into all the words. There are some people who would have you not use certain words. Yeah, there are 400,000 words in the English language, and there are seven of them that you can't say on television. What a ratio that is. 399,993 to seven. They must really be bad. They'd have to be outrageous, to be separated from a group that large. All of you over here, you seven. Bad words. That's what they told us they were, remember? 'That's a bad word.' You know bad words. Bad thoughts. Bad intentions.”

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Author:George Carlin
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“So while you're getting ripped apart head to toe as you fall into a black hole, you will also extrude through the fabric of space and time, like toothpaste squeezed through a tube. To all the words in the English language that describe ways to die (e.g., homicide, suicide, electrocution, suffocation, starvation) we add the term spaghettification.”

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Author:Neil deGrasse Tyson
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“In one of the most brilliant papers in the English language Hume made it clear that what we speak of as 'causality' is nothing more than the phenomenon of repetition. When we mix sulphur with saltpeter and charcoal we always get gunpowder. This is true of every event subsumed by a causal law in other words, everything which can be called scientific knowledge. "It is custom which rules ," Hume said, and in that one sentence undermined both science and philosophy .”

MadeSaidPhilosophyLawSpeakLanguageClearEventsPaperSentencesBrilliantMade ItPhenomenonCustomsRepetitionPapersEnglish LanguageScientific KnowledgeCausalityOne SentenceGunpowderCharcoalHumeScience And Philosophy
Author:Philip K. Dick
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