Robert A. Heinlein Quotes

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.

My favourite language, actually, is Czech, just because it's so colourful. We have so many combinations, words, and expressions. I have to say there are a lot of things which you can say in Czech, but you cannot really translate, because the meaning would make no sense.

Translating from one language to another, unless it is from Greek and Latin, the queens of all languages, is like looking at Flemish tapestries from the wrong side, for although the figures are visible, they are covered by threads that obscure them, and cannot be seen with the smoothness and color of the right side.

Words," he said, "is oh such a twitch-tickling problem to me all my life.

The very same book, even if it is translated very accurately, let's say from Hebrew into English or from English into Hebrew, becomes a different book because language is a musical instrument.

The English language is more complex than calculus because numbers don't have nuances.

Plainly, children learn their language. I don't speak Swahili. And it cannot be that my language is 'an innate property of our brain.' Otherwise I would have been genetically programmed to speak (some variety of) English.

The American language differs from the English in that it seeks the top of expression while English seeks its lowly valleys.

We have two hundred languages in Europe. Two hundred languages! Count them! I know you won't!

And of course the word love has many shades of meaning, as do many, many of the words in our living, breathing language

I am fascinated by language in daily life: the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth.

You cannot write in more than one language. Words don't come out as well.

The classical scholars have kept alive the tradition of the superiority of the ancient languages -- a kaleidoscopic mass of suffixes and prefixes, supposed to represent an infinite shading of meaning. It is a character they share with the Ojibway and the Zulu.

Neither you nor I speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English.

Language is the most beautiful and destructive thing because it allows you to express yourself, but it totally confuses everything.

A dictionary can embrace only a small part of the vast tapestry of a language.

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 world has wanted me to speak differently than I speak. You know, I speak like my mom; I speak like, you know, like the whitest white dude; I speak like a Def Comedy Jam comedian doing an impression of a white guy.

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

For the storyteller, for the arrowmaker, language does indeed represent the only chance for survival.

Programmers are always surrounded by complexity; we cannot avoid it.... If our basic tool, the language in which we design and code our programs, is also complicated, the language itself becomes part of the problem rather than part of its solution.

What is being said is the effect of something that has happened; at the same time, what is being said is in itself something happening, which will, in turn, leave its effect.

French: why does this language even exist? Everyone there speaks english anyway.

Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.

A language is not just words. It's a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It's all embodied in a language.