Czeslaw Milosz Quotes

I think I'm a lot like other moms out there who feel like if we don't have the pecan pie we have every year, then it just won't be Christmas.

There were about 6,000 languages spoken on this planet at the beginning of the 20th century, there are probably only 600 still widely spoken at the beginning of the 21st century. Together with biodiversity, cultural and linguistic diversity are fading fast.

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.

A deep meaning resides in old customs.

Hunchbacks danced at my wedding for luck. It's a thing you don't see nowadays.

We infer the spirit of the nation in great measure from the language, which is a sort of monument, to which each forcible individual in a course of many hundred years has contributed a stone.

We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology's virtues.

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.

If someone tried to assimilate you for years, if your language was forbidden, if the names of your hometown were changed, what would do you but revolt.

Spain is so different from the United States. It seemed to have a history, and the buildings are years and years and years old. Here in the United States an old building is about 17 (years old), and over there it's from 500 B.C., it's incredible.

The death of the music business was insane, but audio recordings have been around now for maybe 120 years. Books have been around for, what, nine centuries? So they're more entrenched than music.

For nearly two hundred years, our nation has derived its strength from the diversity of its people and of their beliefs. That strength has been greatly enhanced by [the Islamic] religious heritage.

We're Mexi-cans not Mexi-can'ts.

If, then, this civilization is to be saved, if it is not to be submerged by centuries of barbarism, but to secure the treasures ofits inheritance on new and more stable foundations, there is indeed need for those now living fully to realize how far the decay has already progressed.

I'm 65 years old. Everyday the future looks a little bit darker. But the past, even the grimy parts of it, well, it just keeps on getting brighter all the time.

I am aware of myself as a four-hundred-year-old woman, born in the captivity of a colonial, pre-industrial oral culture and living now as a contemporary New Yorker.

But there were years when, in search of what I thought was better, nobler things I denied these, my people, and my family. I forgot the songs they sung - and most of those songs are now dead; I erased their dialect from my tongue; I was ashamed of them and their ways of life. But now - yes, I love them; they are a part of my blood; they, with all their virtues and their faults, played a great part in forming my way of looking at life.

All I want is that Americans still be able to read the alphabet in a hundred years. I am not very ambitious.

A language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules. ... Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind.

Tradition is the thief of power. There is no area of our lives where that theft is more evident than in the area of divine healing.

The husbandman is always a better Greek than the scholar is prepared to appreciate, and the old custom still survives, while antiquarians and scholars grow gray in commemorating it.

Language is the archives of history.

Wherever the want of clothing forced them to it, the human race made clothes for thousands of years, without a single man becoming a tailor.

I have no feud, either with my employers, any sponsors, or with the professional critics of radio and television. But I am seized with an abiding fear regarding what these two instruments are doing to our society, our culture and our heritage.

In the coming decades, questions of identity, meaning cultural heritage, language, and religion will play a central role in politics.