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English Language Quotes

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English Language Quotes

“I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression 'killing time.' It's a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment, considering that time, after all, is killing us.”

MomentsAbleCommonExpressionKillingConsideringPreciseEnglish LanguagePonderingCrassTime To KillBreezy
Book:Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays
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“The worst of this sorry bunch of semi-educated losers are those who seem to glory in being irritated by nouns becoming verbs. How dense and deaf to language development do you have to be? If you don’t like nouns becoming verbs, then for heaven’s sake avoid Shakespeare who made a doing-word out of a thing-word every chance he got. He TABLED the motion and CHAIRED the meeting in which nouns were made verbs”

IfsMadeSeemsLanguageHeavenChanceWorstDevelopmentBecomingGloryMeetingsSorrySakeBunchEducatedLoserDeafEnglish LanguageVerbsDenseIrritatedNounsLanguage Development
Author:Stephen Fry
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“Grace has to be the loveliest word in the English language. It embodies almost every attractive quality we hope to find in others. Grace is a gift of the humble to the humiliated. Grace acknowledges the ugliness of sin by choosing to see beyond it. Grace accepts a person as someone worthy of kindness despite whatever grime or hard-shell casing keeps him or her separated from the rest of the world. Grace is a gift of tender mercy when it makes the least sense.”

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Author:Charles R. Swindoll
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“We know from our recent history that English did not come to replace U.S. Indian languages merely because English sounded musical to Indians' ears. Instead, the replacement entailed English-speaking immigrants' killing most Indians by war, murder, and introduced diseases, and the surviving Indians' being pressured into adopting English, the new majority language.”

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Author:Jared Diamond
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“The fact that for a long time Cubism has not been understood and that even today there are people who cannot see anything in it means nothing. I do not read English, an English book is a blank book to me. This does not mean that the English language does not exist. Why should I blame anyone but myself if I cannot understand what I know nothing about?" -Pablo Picasso.”

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Book:Picasso, Braque, Léger: masterpieces from Swiss collections
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“The English language needs a word for that feeling you get when you badly need help, but there is no one you can call because you're not popular enough to have friends, not rich enough to have employees, and not powerful enough to have lackeys. It is a very distinct cocktail of impotence, loneliness and a sudden stark assessment of your non-worth to society? Enturdment?”

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Author:David Wong
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“Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going.”

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Book:Starting from Scratch: A Different Kind of Writers' Manual
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“Why should a novelist not also be a historian? To force unnatural divisions within the English language is to work against its capacious and accommodating nature. To expect a writer to produce only novels, or only histories, is equivalent to demanding from a composer that he or she write only string quartets or piano sonatas.”

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Author:Peter Ackroyd
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“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."”

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Book:Ronald Reagan
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“Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.”

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Book:The Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Prose and Verse: Complete in One Volume
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