David Pogue Quotes

Words are our life. We are human because we use language. So I think we are less human when we use less language.

We have language and they do not. Chimps communicate by embracing, patting, looking - all these things. And they have lots of sounds. But they cannot sit and discuss. They cannot teach about things that are not present, as far as we know.

Without a possibility of change in meanings human communication could not perform its present functions.

Language has no independent existence apart from the people who use it. It is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end of understanding who you are and what society is like.

You couldn't have human society without language.

Chimps don't have language. Humans actively instruct others about how things should be done. Chimpanzees probably pick up cultural traditions by observation.

Language is possible due to a number of cognitive and physical characteristics that are unique to humans but none of which that are unique to language. Coming together they make language possible. But the fundamental building block of language is community.

Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.

Language is basic to all of our existences in this world. We depend on it.

We must plow through the whole of language.

Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.

...language is not the frosting, it's the cake.

Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind.

It was a profound saying of Wilhelm Humboldt, that 'Man is man only by means of speech, but in order to invent speech he must be already man.'

Human language is nothing like the signalling systems of other animals.

The gift of language is the single human trait that marks us all genetically, setting us apart from the rest of life.

The point here is what makes human beings different from other creatures is our ability to use language. We can use words to express ourselves in very eloquent and complex ways. We grow up telling and listening to stories. That's what turns us into the people we are.

LANGUAGE, n. The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another's treasure.

Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature?

What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves. Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.

I do not pretend that language is science. It isan instrument for the attainment of science.

Speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other.

I love language. It doesn't bother me that its effects are partial. To me that is very sanity-producing. It would be weird if the effects of language were more than partial, if your whole life existed within your texts. That would be much scarier to me than language being an inadequate tool to represent.

To suppose that man without language taught himself to speak, seems to me as absurd as it would be to suppose that without legs he could teach himself to walk. Language, therefore, must have been the immediate gift of God.

No one seriously doubts that if Piraha children are brought up in Boston they'll be speaking Boston English, that is, that the capacities are present, unlike other animals, as far as is known. There's no challenge to the theory - not mine, but everyone's - that the human language faculty provides the means for generation of an infinite array of structured expressions.