William Hazlitt Quotes

I mean, language fascinates me anyway, and different words have different energies and you can change the whole drive of a sentence.

Of course language manifests a belief only if we use its words with the implied acceptance of their appositeness.

Words are intermediary between thought and things. We express ourselves really not through words, which are only signs, but through what they signify - through things.

Words are slippery and thoughts are vicious.

It's interesting how people are sensitive to language and how it works.

Thought itself needs words. It runs on them like a long wire. And if it loses the habit of words, little by little it becomes shapeless, somber.

One cannot be too careful with words, they change their minds just as people do.

Why don't you ever wait a second and see what I'm planning, or thinking, before you burst in with your opinions and ideas? You never even give me a chance.

Smaller incidents in my life made me realize that language, even more than color, defines who you are to people.

Words, when well chosen, have so great a force in them, that a description often gives us more lively ideas than the sight of things themselves.

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.

Ideas in secret die. They need light and air or they starve to death.

By speaking, by thinking, we undertake to clarify things, and that forces us to exacerbate them, dislocate them, schematize them. Every concept is in itself an exaggeration.

Yet no one hears his own remarks as prose.

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.

To have no ideas and being able to express them is the essence of journalism.

Language can't solve everything, of course, but it does carry our dreams and our ideas.

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.

The idea of political content is irrelevant. Content is irrelevant. I always tell my students, "Never forget you're writing words! You know, word one, word two, word three, word four. The words have to be organized. Nothing else does."

Merely that you start off with ideas buzzing around in your head, and then you try to give them the simpler, more graceful shape, of a feeling that a reader might share. You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.

Thoughts exchanged by one and another are not the same in one room as in another.

It is not my words that I polish, but my ideas.

We never choose which words to use, for as long as they mean what they mean to mean, we don’t care if they make sense or nonsense.

When words do not enter as factors into a shared situation, either overtly or imaginatively, they operate as pure physical stimuli, not as having a meaning or intellectual value. They set activity running in a given groove, but there is no accompanying conscious purpose or meaning.

Our accent will be upon youth: we need new ideas, new methods, new approaches. We will call upon young students of political science throughout the nation to help us. We will encourage these young students to launch their own independent study, and then give us their analysis and their suggestions. We are completely disenchanted with the old, adult, established politicians. We want to see some new faces -- more militant faces.