Cyril Connolly Quotes

American English is essentially English after having been wiped off with a dirty sponge.

Languages are not owned by nations but by the people who use them and make them live.

Unlike our neighbours on the mainland of Europe, we have resisted creating an academy to legislate over proper English. We each have our linguistic bugbear, but few of us would want to freeze our mother tongue.

Language became a colorless and as indistinct as the business suit which is now worm by everyone, by the scholar, by the businessman, by the professional killer. Being accustomed to a dry and dreary norm and sees in it an obvious sign of arrogance and aggression; viewing authority with almost religious awe he gets into a frenzy when he sees someone pluck the beard of his favorite prophet.

Life is fountain of joy; but where the rabble also gather to drink, all wells are poisoned.

Language is like soil. However rich, it is subject to erosion, and its fertility is constantly threatened by uses that exhaust itsvitality. It needs constant re-invigoration if it is not to become arid and sterile.

Language is the crowning achievement of human beings, and that is something Muslims have always known and revered. We are a literate people whose miracle is a Book from an unlettered man, peace and blessings be upon him, who was the most articulate and eloquent human being who ever lived. We honor our Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, in honoring language that he loved so much and used so well.

When you mix raisins and turds, you've still got turds.

George Orwell once blamed the demise of the English language on politics. It's quite possible he never read a prospectus.

Malcolm Bradbury made the point, and I don't know whether it's a valid one or not, that the real English at the moment is not the English spoken in England or in America or even in Canada or Australia or New Zealand. The real English is the English which is a second language, so that it's rather like Latin in the days of the Roman Empire when people had their own languages, but had Latin in order to communicate.

Pissing in a river, watching it rise.

I doubt that national languages will disappear. In fact, to some extent they're becoming more diverse, like in Europe.

I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.

The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience.

A word once vulgarized can never be rehabilitated.

A word may become so defiled by bad use that it will take a century before it can be purifed, and brought into use again.

You're surrounded by it wherever you go, you walk through it, breathe it...it's in your lungs and under your tongue and between your fingers and toes.

Colonialism is a terrible bane for a people upon whom it is imposed, but a blessing for a language. English's drive to exploit the new and the alien, its zeal in robbing words from other languages, its incapacity to feel qualms over the matter, its museum-size overabundance of vocabulary, it shoulder-shrug approach to spelling, its don't-worry-be-happy concern for grammar-the result was a language whose colour and wealth Henry loved.

For my own part, I do not want the freedom of India if it means extinction of English or the disappearance of Englishmen.

A grimy fly can soil the entire wall and a small, dirty little act can ruin the entire proceedings.

Letters to the editors of English and American newspapers often contain expressions of horror about the new terms that creep into the language, and these expressions are usually accompanied by dire predictions about ruination of the mother tongue.

As a poet, there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language from corruption.

The world's five thousand extant languages are products of our shared ability, but the five thousand cultures they create are separate from each other.

Language is the chief means and index of a nation's progress.

The language we share is at the core of our identity as citizens, and our ticket to full participation in American political life. We can speak any language we want at the dinner table, but English is the language of public discourse, or the marketplace and of the voting booth.