Walter Lippmann Quotes

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.

Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

Whatever one wishes to say, there is one noun only by which to express it, one verb only to give it life, one adjective only which will describe it. One must search until one has discovered them, this noun, this verb, this adjective, and never rest content with approximations, never resort to trickery, however happy, or to vulgarism, in order to dodge the difficulty.

A word is no light matter. Words have with truth been called fossil poetry, each, that is, a symbol of a creative thought.

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.

A writer lives in awe of words, for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator.

Words, mademoiselle, are only the outer clothing of ideas.

Words are but the signs of ideas.

Language is memory and metaphor.

The pen is the tongue of the mind.

Words are the small change of thought.

I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.

I never knew words could be so confusing," Milo said to Tock as he bent down to scratch the dog's ear. "Only when you use a lot to say a little," answered Tock. Milo thought this was quite the wisest thing he'd heard all day.

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.

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

One word is worth a thousand pictures. If it's the right word.

Words, words. They're all we have to go on.

The words. Why did they have to exist? Without them, there wouldn't be any of this.

Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?

Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them!

Leave words to them whom words, not doings, move.

Words... They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more... I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.

Language is a form of organized stutter.