Jacques Derrida Quotes

Language does not leave fossils, at least not until it has become written.

Yes, living voices in a living language, so it seemed to us.

... the progress of the language has caused us to lose many old treasures. It is thus with all progress, and one must make the best of it.

Changes in language often reflect the changing values of a culture.

It was just as the 1914 War burst on me that I made the discovery that 'legends' depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the 'legends' which it conveys by tradition. ... Volapuk, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c &c are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends.

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.

Change is legitimate and inevitable, for our language is a mighty river, picking up silt and flotsam here and discarding it there, but growing ever wider and richer.

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

It is curious that some learned dunces, because they can write nonsense in languages that are dead, should despise those that talk sense in languages that are living.

We can never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, every origin. Writing is that neuter, that composite, that obliquity into which our subject flees, the black-and-white where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.

Language is a living thing

Language is the archives of history.

I learned to write by listening to people talk. I still feel that the best of my writing comes from having heard rather than having read.

A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading.

The culture cannot evolve faster than the language. The language is the flashlight that shows the path.

If words are to change their meanings, as assuredly they are, let each user of language make such changes as please himself, put up his own suggestions, and let the best win.

The only living language is the language in which we think and have our being.

I have difficulties with contemporary language. Big difficulties. I counted, you know, something like 160 words have disappeared from the English language because of the use of the word "like." "I'm like, he's like" - not "thought," not "as if ."

What I think is going on is that probably language was entertainment long before it was meaning. It's a kind of tuneless singing.

The way to recognize a dead word is that it exudes boredom.

Samskrit is the unsurpassed zenith in the whole development of languages yet known to us.

The worst of this sorry bunch of semi-educated losers are those who seem to glory in being irritated by nouns becoming verbs. How dense and deaf to language development do you have to be? If you don’t like nouns becoming verbs, then for heaven’s sake avoid Shakespeare who made a doing-word out of a thing-word every chance he got. He TABLED the motion and CHAIRED the meeting in which nouns were made verbs

A language does not become fixed. The human intellect is always on the march, or, if you prefer, in movement, and languages with it.

What is slang in one age sometimes goes into the vocabulary of the purist in the next.

As far as the writing goes, I started telling stories as soon as I could talk, and started writing them down as soon as I could string words together.