Quotes about Language

Of course, there are those critics - New York critics as a rule - who say, 'Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it's good but then she's a natural writer.' Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.

It seems likely that Jesus, being a scholarly young man, learned some Hebrew, but that's conjecture. It's more likely that Jesus spoke some Greek, as this language dominated the region after the conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century.

Jesus is why women have traveled continents, spent decades learning a strange language so they could translate the Gospel, planting churches, caring for the sick, educating the illiterate, and marching for the oppressed.

I spent most of my career in business not saying the word 'woman.' Because if you say the word 'woman' in a business context, and often in a political context, the person on the other side of the table thinks you're about to sue them or ask for special treatment, right?

Begin to listen to what you say. Don't say anything that you don't want to become true for you.

The way for a person to develop a style is to know exactly what he wants to say, and (b) to be sure he is saying exactly that.

Equations are the devil's sentences.

I like to call everyone that I find slightly annoying a 'sociopath.'

In high school I was very much involved in poetry. You cannot read a poem quickly. There's too much going on there. There are rhythms and alliterations. You have to read poetry slow, slow, slow to absorb it all.

The word gap leads to an achievement gap and has life-long consequences

If you cannot answer a man's argument, all it not lost; you can still call him vile names.

There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.