Andy Rooney Quotes

Oh, God, I don't know what's more difficult, life or the English language.

Of all the words in all languages I know, the greatest concentration is in the English word I.

The English language has a deceptive air of simplicity; so have some little frocks; but they are both not the kind of thing you can run up in half an hour with a machine.

The more you try to pin a word down, the more you realize that it has its own cape, sword and little hat.

They place great stress on the clarity of our language for expressing nuances and showing subtleties.

These examples of the lack of simplicity in English and French, all appearances to the contrary, could be multiplied almost without limit and apply to all national languages.

I think literary theory has not been terribly good for English studies in a while. It's not that theory isn't interesting, but it isn't about books, or the idiosyncrasies and complexities of putting language together.

There are two words for everything.

As problems have grown more complex, leaders have struggled to find the language to discuss them clearly, credibly and at the right emotional amplitude. Nonplussed and tongue-tied, politicians give themselves over to message gurus … who peddle the notion that poll-tested words — honed and targeted with scientific precision — can pick the lock of public opinion.

English may be the fastest moving language in the world, but there are plenty of concepts, sensations and everyday occurrences which lack a pithy word to describe them. Take the clunkiness of 'the day before yesterday' and 'the day after tomorrow': German provides single words for both.

The numbers don't always tell the whole story.

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

Life cannot be captured in a few axioms. And that is just what I keep trying to do. But it won't work, for life is full of endless nuances and cannot be captured in just a few formulae.

It is terrible to see someone being beaten up by the English language.

We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.

A life spent writing has taught me to be wary of words. Those that seem clearest are often the most treacherous.

Oh child, your language is so utterly simple and limited that it has the affect of extreme complication. -Aunt Beast

The words that are coming out of my mouth and how I mean them, it's so much different.

In a language as idiomatically stressed as English, opportunities for misreadings are bound to arise. By a mere backward movement of stress, a verb can become a noun, an act a thing. To refuse, to insist on saying no to what you believe is wrong, becomes at a stroke refuse, an insurmountable pile of garbage.

Language is a very complicated thing, and that's one of the reasons why I like making photographs.

Language is, in other words, not necessary, but voluntary. If it were necessary, it would have stayed simple; it would not agitate our hearts with ever-present loveliness and ever-cresting ambiguity; it would not dream, on its long white bones, of turning into song.

English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner. Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman's apparel is clearly asking to be mangled.

Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.

A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one's vocabulary and the greater one's awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one's thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.

What a pity it is that there are so many words! Whenever one wants to say anything, three or four ways of saying it run into one's head together and one can't tell which to choose. It is as troublesome and puzzling as choosing a ribbon ... or a husband.