Terry Pratchett Quotes

We tend to look through language and not realize how much power language has.

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.

We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.

I am sure that as soon as speech was invented, efforts to suppress and control it began, and that process of suppression continues unabated.

Words, as you well know, can be powerful. - Digger

Words on a page can hypnotize you if the rhythm is right

Every word out of my mouth is a word that I've approved.

Your words are so powerful and precious. Learn to harness them, guide them and let them work for you.

Your words are containers for power, and by the words you speak you frame your world!

No, honestly, my mouth shouldn't be able to function unless my brain's engaged.

The human tongue is like wasabi: it's very powerful, and should be used sparingly.

The words that come out of our mouths do not vanish but are perpetually stored in infinite space, and they will come back to us in due time.

Every time my brain parks the car neatly in the driveway, my mouth drives through the back of the garage.

I don't particularly like it when people put words in my mouth, either, by the way, unless I say it.

Men suppose their reason has command over their words; still it happens that words in return exercise authority on reason

A good word costs as little as a bad one, and is worth more.

Some members of Congress ought to have their mouths taped instead of their speeches.

When you are interviewing someone, you have a chance to follow up, to press, to dig in. In a debate there's 30 seconds for the other guy, too. And the goal is to get them to engage with each other, not to engage you necessarily.

Government want to tell you things you can't say because they're against the law, or you can't say this because it's against a regulation, or here's something you can't say because its a... secret; "You can't tell him that because he's not cleared to know that." Government wants to control information and control language because that's the way you control thought, and basically that's the game they're in.

I am under the spell of language, which has ruled me since I was 10.

The way a question is asked limits and disposes the ways in which any answer to it-right or wrong-may be given.

In recognizing that words have power to define and to compel, the semanticists are actually testifying to the philosophic quality of language which is the source of their vexation. In an attempt to get rid of that quality, they are looking for some neutral means which will be a nonconductor of the current called "emotion" and its concomitant of evaluation.

Realize now the power that your words command if you simply choose them wisely.

Words matter, words have import.

Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints --the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk --we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.