Peter Farb Quotes

I know what the structure of the language is.

English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminology are based on Latin, a language with which it has precious little in common.

Weaknesses in men of genius are usually an exaggeration of their personal feeling; in the hands of feeble imitators they become the most flagrant blunders. Entire schools have been founded on misinterpretations of certain aspects of the masters. Lamentable mistakes have resulted from the thoughtless enthusiasm with which men have sought inspiration from the worst qualities of remarkable artists because they are unable to reproduce the sublime elements in their work.

Speakers who have grown up in the American community unconsciously know its rules about taking turns in conversations-in the same way that they know the rules of grammar and the rules about appropriate speech in various situations.

Better the feet slip then the tongue.

Eloquence is the language of nature, and cannot be learned in the schools; but rhetoric is the creature of art, which he who feels least will most excel in.

Obviously, it's a great privilege and pleasure to be here at the Yale Law School Sesquicentennial Convocation. And I defy anyone to say that and chew gum at the same time.

A problem with school is that you often become what you study. If you study, let say cooking, you become a chef. If you study law, you become an attorney, and a study of auto mechanics makes you mechanics. The mistake in becoming what you study is that, too many people forget to mind their own business. They spend their lives minding someone else's business and making that person rich

I studied painting and sculpting at school and became an actress by mistake .... I've had many lovers and still have romances. I am very spoiled. All my life, I've had too many admirers.

He seems to have declared war on the King’s English as well as on the English king.

For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules-- it hasn't been taught to us by means of strict rules, either. We, in our discussions on the other hand, constantly compare language with a calculus preceding to exact rules.

I am not very conscious of the figures of speech that I use.

My mistakes made were learning how to work with different groups of people. I mean, I went to school at Berkeley, which is a pretty diverse group, but working in a professional setting, I hadn't really done that before and learning about office politics, learning about interactions between different people and I made a lot of mistakes there during my time as a young person. I was 19 or 20 at the time. So, I would say those were my biggest career mistakes, but fortunately they were made in the context of an engineering co-op program and not in a professional field.

The mistake that was made in the '70s is we stopped policing the streets, we stopped cleaning the streets, we stopped cleaning the graffiti off buildings, we stopped supporting our cultural institutions and building parks and schools and all those kinds of things.

This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.

Using adverbs is a mortal sin.

I remember one English teacher in the eighth grade, Florence Schrack, whose husband also taught at the high school. I thought what she said made sense, and she parsed sentences on the blackboard and gave me, I'd like to think, some sense of English grammar and that there is a grammar, that those commas serve a purpose and that a sentence has a logic, that you can break it down. I've tried not to forget those lessons, and to treat the English language with respect as a kind of intricate tool.

You can't find me 20 children in Chicago, I don't care which section you go in - you can be on Michigan Avenue or here - and they won't be able to tell you that y is a vowel when it's the final syllable in a word, as in Nancy and icy. And no one bothers to teach the rules anymore - "i before e except after c."

When I read some of the rules for speaking and writing the English language correctly, I think any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it.

I hate commas in the wrong places.

No matter what any of the grammar teachers say, punctuation is an arbitrary matter. It should be used to make sentences clear.

Harvard students have completed more English courses and less forward passes than any school in this generation.

We are all born with the power of speech, but we need grammar. Conscience, too, needs Revelation.

The rule is: don’t use commas like a stupid person. I mean it.

Make no a complete sentence.