Salman Rushdie Quotes

As our larynxes descended, we were able to make sounds with our mouths in new and far more expressive ways. Verbal language soon overtook physical gesturing as the primary means of communication for all human beings except Italians. (Earth (The Book), p. 36)

Language is a living thing. We can feel it changing. Parts of it become old: they drop off and are forgotten. New pieces bud out, spread into leaves, and become big branches, proliferating.

The earlier truths are not expelled but absorbed, not contradicted but extended; and the history of each science, which may thus appear like a succession of revolutions, is, in reality, a series of developements.

I listen a lot to how people speak. I've read a great many good books in my life. I had some excellent English teachers. Surely, those things were helpful.

While language can surely be used for communication (as can much else), communication probably has no special role in its design or evolution.

Language is a living thing

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.

When I was a little boy, I thought when I grew up I would talk Yiddish. I thought little kids talked English, but when they became adults, they would talk Yiddish like the adults did. There would be no reason to talk English anymore, because we would have made it.

Language helps develp life as surely as it reflects life. It is a most important part of our human condition.

It isn't that information is exploding, but accessibility is. There's just about as much information this year as there was last year; it's been growing at a steady rate. It's just that now it's so much more accessible because of information technology. The consensus is that a Web crawler could get to a terabyte of publicly accesible HTML. A terabyte is about a million books. the UC Berkeley library has about 8 million books, and the Library of Congress has 20 million books.

You know it’s them books what make you talk funny.

I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books.

Language is something that springs from the biological matrix, and the neurological matrix, within us.

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

Evolution teaches us the original purpose of language was to ritualize men's threats and curses, his spells to compel the gods; communication came later.

Because a child of one doubles its age after the passage of a single year, it can be said to be aging rapidly.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.

Good books are to the young mind what the warming sun and the refreshing rain of spring are to the seeds which have lain dormant in the frosts of winter. They are more, for they may save from that which is worse than death, as well as bless with that which is better than life.

There were 5 Exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003, but that much information is now created every 2 days.

Progress comes from the intelligent use of experience.

It seems to me that it is psyche in a way that has become occluded by the perverse development of language.

Language does not stand still. Surprisingly, despite this knowledge, most speakers are fearful of change.

Although humans have existed on this planet for perhaps 2 million years, the rapid climb to modern civilization within the last 200 years was possible due to the fact that the growth of scientific knowledge is exponential; that is, its rate of expansion is proportional to how much is already known. The more we know, the faster we can know more. For example, we have amassed more knowledge since World War II than all the knowledge amassed in our 2-million-year evolution on this planet. In fact, the amount of knowledge that our scientists gain doubles approximately every 10 to 20 years.

The Quest for Prosperity is an important book. Written with verve and clarity, it reflects a deep understanding of global economic issues, and proposes practical solutions that anyone concerned with the plight of the world's poor would be wise to read.