Richard Dawkins Quotes

As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.

My use of language is part and parcel of my message.

Words have meaning. And their meaning doesn't change.

The important thing to remember is that bugs don't actually talk.

Whether animals admit it or not, they and I communicate.

Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things.

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.

The symbolic view of things is a consequence of long absorption in images. Is sign language the real language of Paradise?

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.

Language is memory and metaphor.

I'm in the role of helping these apes negotiate the human role. I'm just a temporary intermediary in what I think will be eventual communication between the two species.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

Metaphor matters because it creates expectations.

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

The way I make art - the way a lot of people make art - is as an extension of language and communication, where references are incredibly important.

Any psychology of sign systems will be part of social psychology - that is to say, will be exclusively social; it will involve the same psychology as is applicable in the case of languages.

It has not been for nothing that the word has remained man's principal toy and tool: without the meanings and values it sustains, all man's other tools would be worthless.

We emphasize that such a form of communication is not absent in man, however evanescent a naturally given object may be for him, split as it is in its submission to symbols.

Brute animals have the vowel sounds; man only can utter consonants.

It's fortunate that I am a writer, because that has helped me understand the properties of words. They are what have made life complex. In the battle for status in the animal kingdom, power and aggressiveness have been all-important. But among humans, once they acquired speech, all that changed.

Men substitute words for reality and then argue about the words.

I'm a linguist. I study how people talk to each other and how the ways we talk affect our relationships.

Before language, cavemen simply grunted, and then they used the club. Communication changed that. It's the mechanism that created civilization and prevents its own destruction.

Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.

Words are a strange thing. You once saw an animal and decided it's a 'cat.' But cat is a sound. This cat has nothing to do with the animal. But I have decided it's a cat. So a cat it is.