Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

Our biggest technology that we ever, ever invented was articulated language with built-out grammar. It is that that allows us to imagine things far in the future and things way back in the past.

It is not so difficult a task to plant new truths, as to root out old errors; for there is this paradox in men, they run after that which is new, but are prejudiced in favor of that which is old.

Was there a little time between the invention of language and the coming of true and false?

We cannot evolve faster than our language. The edge of being is the edge of meaning, and somehow we have to push the edge of meaning. We have to extend it.

Nostalgia combines regularly with manifest respectability to give credence to old error as opposed to new truth.

The plain people, hereafter as in the past, will continue to make their own language, and the best that grammarians can do is to follow after it, haltingly, and not often with much insight into it.

Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of language.

It is by metaphor that language grows.

Change is legitimate and inevitable, for our language is a mighty river, picking up silt and flotsam here and discarding it there, but growing ever wider and richer.

The English language took in many many fertilizations, many many genes, from other languages, from foreign languages - Latin, French, Nordic languages, German, Scandinavian languages.

It was a profound saying of Wilhelm Humboldt, that 'Man is man only by means of speech, but in order to invent speech he must be already man.'

Language does not leave fossils, at least not until it has become written.

Things were first made, then words.

Samskrit is the unsurpassed zenith in the whole development of languages yet known to us.

Language comes into being, like consciousness, from the basic need, from the scantiest intercourse with other human.

Language does not stand still. Surprisingly, despite this knowledge, most speakers are fearful of change.

LEXICOGRAPHER, n. A pestilent fellow who, under the pretense of recording some particular stage in the development of a language, does what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods.

Language is a living thing

We are all prisoners of our past. It is hard to think of things except in the way we have always thought of them. But that solves no problems and seldom changes anything.

By such innovations are languages enriched, when the words are adopted by the multitude, and naturalized by custom.

Dictionary: a malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic

The power of the past to still dominate our thinking today.

In the modern languages there was not, six hundred years ago, a single volume which is now read. The library of our profound scholar must have consisted entirely of Latin books.

To write well consists of continuously making small erosions, wearing away grammar in its established form, current norms of language. It is an act of permanent rebellion and subversion against social environs.