Quotes about Language

But in the church, I would rather speak five coherent words to instruct others than ten thousand words in a tongue.

If anyone speaks in a tongue, two, or at most three, should speak in turn, and someone must interpret.

Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk, or crude joking, which are out of character, but rather thanksgiving.

But now you must put aside all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips.

Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names.

Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.

Users are a double-edged sword. They can help you improve your language, but they can also deter you from improving. So choose your users carefully, and be slow to grow their number. Having users is like optimization: the wise course is to delay it.

Cobol, for all its sometime popularity, does not seem to have any intellectual descendants. It is an evolutionary dead- end a Neanderthal language.

I suspect few housing projects in the US were designed by architects who expected to live in them. You see the same thing in programming languages. C, Lisp, and Smalltalk were created for their own designers to use. Cobol, Ada, and Javawere created for other people to use. If you think you're designing something for idiots, odds are you're not designing something good, even for idiots.

It's hard to predict what life will be like in a hundred years. There are only a few things we can say with certainty. We know that everyone will drive flying cars, that zoning laws will be relaxed to allow buildings hundreds of stories tall, that it will be dark most of the time, and that women will all be trained in the martial arts. Here I want to zoom in on one detail of this picture. What kind of programming language will they use to write the software controlling those flying cars?

I learned that the world has a soul, and that whoever understands that soul can also understand the language of things.

You came so that you could learn about your dreams, said the old woman. And dreams are the language of God. When he speaks in our language, I can interpret what he has said. But if he speaks in the language of the soul, it is only you who can understand.