Willard Van Orman Quine Quotes

You couldn't have human society without language.

My language is what I use, and if I lost that, I wouldn't be able to say anything.

Language and identity are so fundamentally intertwined. You peel back all the layers in terms of what we wear and what we eat and all the things that mark us, and in the end, what we have are our words.

Language. By this we build pyramids, fight battles, ordain and administer laws, shape and teach religion, and knit man to man, cultivate each other, and ourselves.

Language is possible due to a number of cognitive and physical characteristics that are unique to humans but none of which that are unique to language. Coming together they make language possible. But the fundamental building block of language is community.

Language is the friendliest of the things from which we cannot escape.

Humans are a social species more than any other, and in order to build a community, which for some reason humans have to do in order to live, we have to solve the communication problem. Language is the tool that was invented to solve that problem.

Language is basic to all of our existences in this world. We depend on it.

As humans we speak one language.

Language is our way of communicating what we want and who we are.

Language is the tool of my trade -and I use them all - all the Englishes I grew up with

I feel my poetry has contributed through all these languages that I needed to learn leading up to English.

Language is like songs, like food, like dance-it is the expression of what we think.

One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

If you have the language gift, you can use it as a tool.

Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.

Well, I like how people talk. I like language. You know, Linda Richman spoke in Yiddish.

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.

Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.

I speak two languages, Body and English.

For the benefit of those who are not bilingual, I will now continue in English.

If you spend your time trying to learn English, you fall behind in your course content… I know because when I came here I could not speak English. So that was the idea of Congress when we passed bi-lingual education. But that was to only go on for a short time—one and one half years. But many of the bi-lingual education programs of today go on for year after year and they are destructive because the primary objective is to learn English.

Language turned apes like us into civil creatures.

English, for me, is an acquired language. I started with English at the age of 10. At the time, it was my third language.