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Subjects | Fact sheet | Samples
Language and usage: Sample quotations
Italo Calvino
Italian writer and critic
The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient prohibitions.
['Cybernetics and Ghosts' lecture, Turin November 1969, published in The Literature Machine]
Noam Chomsky
US linguist and political analyst
Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.
[Example of a meaningless, but grammatically correct sentence, in Syntactic Structures]
John Dryden
English poet and dramatist
A thing well said will be wit in all languages.
[Essay of Dramatic Poesy]
Helen Gardner
English scholar and critic
I don't think any words are brutal and disgusting in themselves.
[C H Rolph (ed) Trial of Lady Chatterley (Testimony in Regina v. Penguin Books Ltd)]
Samuel Johnson
English lexicographer, author, and critic
Lexicographer A writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.
[Dictionary of the English Language]
Rudyard Kipling
English writer
Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
[Speech 14 February 1923]
Arthur Koestler
Hungarian-born British writer
True creativity often starts where language ends.
[The Act of Creation bk 1, pt 2, ch. 7]
Dennis Potter
English playwright
The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they have been in.
[Remark]
Carl Sandburg
US poet
Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.
[The New York Times 13 February 1959]
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Austrian philosopher
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
[Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus]
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