Josh Billings Quotes

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

I am a writer, I deal in words. There is no word that should stay in word jail, every word is completely free. There is no word that is worse than another word. It's all language, it's all communication.

For me, language is a freedom. As soon as you have found the words with which to express something, you are no longer incoherent, you are no longer trapped by your own emotions, by your own experiences; you can describe them, you can tell them, you can bring them out of yourself and give them to somebody else. That is an enormously liberating experience.

I don't feel guilty about expressing myself in French; nor do I feel that I am continuing the work of the colonizers.

I do not use the language of my people. I can take liberties with certain themes which the Arabic language would not allow me to take.

I don't feel restricted by the language: I feel more free.

My first language is French. I just love words so much, and in French it feels like I can say whatever I want however I want.

The attitude of independence toward a constructed language which all national speakers must adopt is really a great advantage, because it tends to make man see himself as the master of language instead of its obedient servant.

That's so different in Hong Kong when I'm using my own mother language, I can treat the line in one thousand different ways, with many different reactions.

If, in English, we speak words, the French speak thoughts.

Be it Hindi or Hinglish, Zee was never and will never be speechless.

I can do whatever I want, and I'm not going to let anyone tell me what language I should speak in.

Lots of people speak Afrikaans. It's not a statement; it's just a language that we use to communicate. It has its own flavour; it's got its own slang. People laugh. People like it. They like us being open.

What I really like to learn how to do is to build sentences that are equal to mental states.

Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.

We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining our identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression.

When you are lying awake with a dismal headache, and repose is tabooed by anxiety, I conceive you may use any language you choose to indulge in without impropriety.

The world that is coming toward us out of time is going to be very much richer in a mental sense because (among other freedoms) we are going to get a modicum of freedom from linguistic frameworks, from familiar mental habits. Anyone who really knows two or more tongues realizes that even that small enlargement of liberty . . . gives him new perspectives, exercizes his soul anew.

...words are in a way our godly sharing in the work of creation, and the speaking and writing of words is at once the most human and the most holy business we engage in.

Technology is a vocabulary and a language in which you can say many things.

Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about.

Obviously people's feelings are going to get hurt when you use certain words, but you can't outlaw words. They're really the history of our culture. They tell you what's going on. When you make words politically incorrect you're taking all the poetry out of the language. I'm pro anybody living their lives the way they want to live, sexually and otherwise; and I'm anti any kind of language repression.

I know no other way out of what is both the maze of the eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words.

If I'm a faggot spell it right, I got way more than two G's

The liberation of language is rooted in the liberation of ourselves.