David Ogilvy Quotes

Try not to be either intimidated by or a captive of jargon. Even though it's language, and language is about communication, it often exists actually to obfuscate and to control power and not to communicate.

I learned to use language like my mother did. I would simulcast, give you the program in your own tongue.

All those big words produce disgust today.

The most incomprehensible talk comes from people who have no other use for language than to make themselves understood.

Don't use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.

I'd come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language.

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

Don't, Sir, accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.

If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.

Some facts in life are immutable. One is, trust no-one who uses the word 'trope'.

I think the use of language is a very important means by which this species, because of its biological nature, creates a kind of social space, to place itself in interactions with other people. It doesn't have much to do with communication in a narrow sense; that is, it doesn't involve transmission of information. There is much information transmitted but it is not the content of what is said that is transmitted.

The internet must be used to maximise open communication and we should encourage the expansion of its use.

I am allowed to use plain English because everybody knows that I could use mathematical logic if I chose.

A laxity pervades the popular use of words.

Don't use your words to describe the situation. Use your words to change the situation.

Rhetoric is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic and continually born anew: the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols.

Great men, like nature, use simple language.

Bilingual-education advocates say it's important to teach a child in his or her family's language. I say you can't use family language in the classroom - the very nature of the classroom requires that you use language publicly.

What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do?

One of our defects as a nation is a tendency to use what have been called "weasel words."

Find something you like, go into a room, close the door and read it aloud. Read it aloud. Everybody in the world who likes dance can see dance, or hear music, or see art, or admire architecture - but everybody in the world uses words who is not a recluse or mute. But the writer has to take these most common things, more common than musical notes or dance positions, a writer has to take some adverbs, and verbs and nouns and ball them up together and make them bounce.

My natural tendency is to complicate everything--and then to spray words and ideas onto everything afterwards. I've had to develop the habit of keeping things simple.

It applies even more to politicians because they are living, breathing embodiments of the language that they use. And it's why how you start the conversation, and how you end it, matters so much.

I think fiction goes to poetry for the intensity of its use of language.