Quotes of: Human-language Keyword

Literature shrivels in a universal language, and an uprooted language rots before it dies. And it should be possible to lift the eyes above the cant of the ‘language of Shakespeare’... sufficiently to realise the magnitude of the loss to humanity...

J.R.R. Tolkien

The only language all human beings understand is the language of humanity.

Le Baobab Fou

Language is a weapon of politicians, but language is a weapon in much of human affairs.

Noam Chomsky

Human language... prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.

Lewis Thomas

Language is an archaeological vehicle... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.

Russell Hoban

Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form.

The Elements of Typographic Style

Words are our life. We are human because we use language. So I think we are less human when we use less language.

Carol Shields

legal investigation. As Clinton noted, “My goal in this deposition was to be truthful, but not particularly helpful.

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature

The language of poetry is a language of deep intimacy that is meant to touch the human spirit and awaken it to the mystery of life, all life.

When Angels Are Born

Humans are so innately hardwired for language that they can no more suppress their ability to learn and use language than they can suppress the instinct to pull a hand back from a hot surface.

The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

Language is possible due to a number of cognitive and physical characteristics that are unique to humans but none of which that are unique to language. Coming together they make language possible. But the fundamental building block of language is com...

Daniel Everett

The language of intrinsic human rights represented a significant advance beyond the previous language of world religions in terms of its universal applicability and its thiswordliness.

Immanuel Wallerstein

The unfortunate are not as miserable as the world imagines. That urchins, the handicapped, orphans, prisoners and others are much happier than people think. And that language is a trap, that a dark evolutionary force has created languages to limit hu...

Serious Men

If human language, with its logic, is the way God has given us to understand the world, then the Torah must be understood in that same language and with that same logic.

David Novak

Every poet knows that the gift of the gods is not fire but language. “Man dwells poetically on this earth,” Hölderin wrote. Language is the essence of being human. We can think, thanks to language, for thought exists only by the grace of words. ...

Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal

To deny access to translation and interpreting services oppresses human rights and violates laws.

Found in Translation: How Language Shapes Our Lives and Transforms the World

Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality—the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the trut...

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature

As long as human beings speak different languages, the need for translation will continue.

Found in Translation: How Language Shapes Our Lives and Transforms the World

I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child. . . . that one of the most deeply human, an...

The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction

When animals do something noble we say they are behaving ‘like humans’. When humans do something disgusting we say they are behaving ‘like animals’. Clumsy use of the English language perpetuates the myth that animals are inferior and disposa...

Phillip Wollen

[T]hat all seekers of knowledge should use the identical language to think and to read and write is not a development to which humanity can remain indifferent. Reality is constructed by languages, and the existence of a variety of languages means the...

The Fall of Language in the Age of English