Lewis Carroll Quotes

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.'

I think with all my books, language has been their subject as much as anything else. Language can elide or displace or sideline whole groups of people. You can't necessarily change the way language is used, but if it becomes something you're conscious of... that gives you a certain power over it.

Society is made of words, whose meanings the powerful control, or try to.

Drop a word in the ocean of meaning and concentric ripples form. To define a single word means to try to catch those ripples. No one’s hands are fast enough.

I maintain that any writer of a book is fully authorised in attaching any meaning he likes to a word or phrase he intends to use. If I find an author saying, at the beginning of his book, "Let it be understood that by the word 'black' I shall always mean 'white,' and by the word 'white' I shall always mean 'black,'" I meekly accept his ruling, however injudicious I think it.

I master only the language of others. Mine does with me what it wants.

If you can not master your language you must be it's slave.

It depends on what the meaning of “is” is.

If we are to look only at the words, then we inquire, not what this man meant, but what those words would mean in the mouth of a normal speaker.

We invented words; we'll tell you how they're supposed to sound.

I don't remember a time when words were not dangerous.

It is important that we realize that words have meanings far beyond the dictionary definition.

Think how different it is to experience a word than a sound. When you're hearing a singer, you're controlled by the words, because you understand the language, you know what they're talking about, and you're forced to think about what they're talking about. But when you're hearing that same thing without a word, you're free to wander.

Mathematics is only the art of saying the same thing in different words.

I'm very much afraid I didn't mean anything but nonsense. Still, you know, words mean more than we mean to express when we use them; so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer means. So, whatever good meanings are in the book, I'm glad to accept as the meaning of the book.

I looked up 'standard' in the dictionary. There are eleven different definitions.

Man's achievements rest upon the use of symbols.... we must consider ourselves as a symbolic, semantic class of life, and those who rule the symbols, rule us.

Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?

It all depends what you mean by.

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

Power floats like money, like language, like theory.

Reality, the oppressor's tongue.

I was once told by someone wise that writing is perilous as you cannot always guarantee your words will be read in the spirit in which they were written.

Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?

How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.