Wade Davis Quotes

Language is the chief means and index of a nation's progress.

Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going.

Language is the only chimera whose illusory power is endless, the inexhaustibility which keeps life from being impoverished. Let men learn to serve language.

The places I come from have such rich languages, such a variety of expression. In Sierra Leone we have about fifteen languages and three dialects. I grew up speaking about seven of them.

While a people preserves its language; it preserves the marks of liberty.

I studied French in high school and German in college and I once took a 24-hour Italian crash course. English has by far the most words in it of any other language. Our money might not be worth anything anymore, but the language is.

I do not speak Hebrew, but I understand that it has no word for 'history.' The closest word for it is memory.

The day a race ceases to express its thought and its sentiments in that language which has grown with it and which took form with its ethnic temperament, it is lost as a race. The preservation of its language is absolutely necessary to the preservation of the race, of its genius, its character and it's temperament.

We will never have "a" Chicano English or Spanish because of regional differences. But I think that because of our bilingual history, we'll always be speaking a special kind of English and Spanish. What we do have to do is fight for the right to use those two languages in the way that it serves us.

Enshrined in a language is the whole of a community's history and a large part of its cultural identity. The world is a mosaic of visions. To lose even one piece of this mosaic is a loss for all of us.

Language and identity are so fundamentally intertwined. You peel back all the layers in terms of what we wear and what we eat and all the things that mark us, and in the end, what we have are our words.

I think it's about the feeling more than a language. And I think that we and every culture in the world has to keep their own language just to bring something else, something different, and show a different vision of the world, actually. And that's why I'm trying to keep my language.

Tell me how much a nation knows about its own language, and I will tell you how much that nation knows about its own identity.

... the progress of the language has caused us to lose many old treasures. It is thus with all progress, and one must make the best of it.

Our language, one of our most precious natural resources, deserves at least as much protection as our woodlands, streams and whooping cranes.

According to the United Nations' latest count, of the approximately 3,000 languages spoken in the world today, only some 78 have a literature. Of those 78, a scant five or six enjoy a truly international audience.

Language is an old-growth forest of the mind.

The English language is nobody's special property.

There's no such thing as dead languages, only dormant minds.

To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have used and which is in danger of being lost -that is to say, one of the elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated civilization -is to extend the scope of social observation and to serve civilization.

Words have power. Use the language of leadership versus the vocabulary of a victim.

Language is the archives of history.

They took away our land, our language, and our religion; but they could never harness our tongues.

Language is a spiritual mansion in which you live and nobody has the right to evict you.

Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations.