Rakim Quotes

All words have life cycles.

Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.

Take it not amiss, O speech, that I borrow weighty words, and later try hard to make them seem light.

One has to watch the new words that are introduced into politics—you never know what you are admitting to.

Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language's own means.

I would say 'woman' used to be a noun, and now it is a noun and also an adjective. And words change their functions in that way. It's one of the most common phenomena about words. They start as one thing, and they end up as something else.

What do you call that when you add '-ism' on the end of a word? What is that process? 'Wordism'? Something like that, yeah.

But the adjectives change,” said Jimmy. “Nothing’s worse than last year’s adjectives.

The glossary of politics is so full of euphemistic words and phrases - as in the nature of things it must be - that one would suppose politicians must sometimes strain their wits to coin them.

We want to create a sort of linguistic Lourdes, where evil and misfortune are dispelled by a dip in the waters of euphemism

I believe every change any word has undergone probably originated in ignorance.

By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.

If you listen to the urban speech patterns there you'll find it's quite characteristic that a sentence will begin in one language, go through a second language and end in a third. It's the very playful, very natural result of juggling languages. You are always reaching for the most appropriate phrase.

If drumsticks are for playing drums, you would think that breadsticks would be for playing bread, wouldn't you? "Would you like some breadsticks?" "No, thank you, I don't play bread. I play drums. Perhaps I'll have a drum roll."

What all these lofty and vague phrases boil down to is that the court can impose things that the voters don't want and the Constitution does not require, but which are in vogue in circles to which the court responds.

To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.

Because of the complexity of the problem, environmental skepticism was once tenable. No longer. It is time to flip from skepticism to activism.

What are your fees?" inquired Guyal cautiously. "I respond to three questions," stated the augur. "For twenty terces I phrase the answer in clear and actionable language; for ten I use the language of cant, which occasionally admits of ambiguity; for five, I speak a parable which you must interpret as you will; and for one terce, I babble in an unknown tongue.

Hardly any original thoughts on mental or social subjects ever make their way among mankind or assume their proper importance in the minds even of their inventors, until aptly selected words or phrases have as it were nailed them down and held them fast.

Language is a machine for making falsehoods.

I have heard a greater storm in a boiling pot.

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, every poem an epitaph.

People are bringing SHOTGUNS to UFO sightings...brings a whole new meaning to that phrase 'You ain't from around here, ar'ya?'

Holy solitaries' is a phrase no more consistent with the Gospel than holy adulterers. The Gospel of Christ knows no religion but social; no holiness, but social holiness.