Colin Wilson Quotes

When language is used without true significance, it loses its purpose as a means of communication and becomes an end in itself.

We gave you a perfectly good language and you f***ed up.

we have let rhetoric do the job of poetry.

There is only one way to degrade mankind permanently and that is to destroy language.

POLONIUS: What do you read, my lord? HAMLET: Words, words, words.

It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched.

A babble of words that no one understands now fills the airwaves, and language loses all meaning as we sink slowly, mindlessly, into herstory rather than history because most rapists are men, aren't they?

The problem with words is that they easily lose their meaning. Say something often enough and it becomes a tic, not an expression of how you actually feel. Not only that, but words rarely change things. Actions do.

Not literature alone, but society itself is wormed and rotten when language ceases to be respected not merely by advertisers and politicians, but by persons of learning and authority.

Where Nature's end of language is declin'd, And men talk only to conceal the mind.

The language doesn't mean anything anymore, folks. Truth doesn't mean anything anymore.

Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday

When speech is divorced from speaker and word from meaning, what is left is just ritual, language as ritual.

An English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was, ‘What’s your alma mater?’ I told him, ‘Books.

Hands have their own language.

A false or misunderstood word may create as much disaster as a sudden thoughtless act.

Conversation is the wall we build between ourselves and other people, too often with tired words like used and broken bottles which, catching the sunlight as they lie embedded in the wall, are mistaken for jewels.

The only authors whom I acknowledge as American are the journalists. They, indeed, are not great writers, but they speak the language of their countrymen, and make themselves heard by them.

If I had to write a book, I could not find anything in the world worth saying - as is indeed the case with many voluminous authors.

To call that writing, madam, is an insult to quills and ink across the world.

You taught me language, and my profit on't / Is, I know how to curse

There is no use indicting words, they are no shoddier than what they peddle.

Without a constant misuse of language there cannot be any discovery, any progress

The English language is an arsenal of weapons. If you are going to brandish them without checking to see whether or not they are loaded, you must expect to have them explode in your face from time to time.

Language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication.