#lang

New concepts should be introduced by the power of imagery. ↗

— Douglas Coop

#charisma #civil-disobedience #loaded-language #power #propaganda

Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl. Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God, the dew on a fresh apple, it's the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning sun when you pull from an old bookshelf a forgotten volume of erotic diaries; language is the faint scent of urine on a pair of boxer shorts, it's a half-remembered childhood birthday party, a creak on the stair, a spluttering match held to a frosted pane, the warm wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred Panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl, cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot. ↗

— Stephen Fry

#bbc #language #linguistics #writing #trust

Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical, real consciousness that exists for other men as well, and only therefore does it also exist for me; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men. ↗

— Karl Marx

#men

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. ↗

— George Orwell

#english-language #insincerity #english

An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language. ↗

— Martin Buber

#eyes #great #language #power #speak

For the happy man prayer is only a jumble of words, until the day when sorrow comes to explain to him the sublime language by means of which he speaks to God. ↗

— Alexandre Dumas

#prayer #religious #sorrow #language

What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written. ↗

— Jacques Derrida

#irony #language #speech #truth #writing

I had a feeling that Pandora's box contained the mysteries of woman's sensuality, so different from a man's and for which man's language was so inadequate. The language of sex had yet to be invented. The language of the senses was yet to be explored. ↗

— Anaïs Nin

#erotica #sex #language

Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service. ↗

— Wilkie Collins

#words #language

In Iraq, interpreters were ten times more likely to be killed than were U.S. troops. ↗

— Nataly Kelly

#language #linguistics #translation #iraq