Ellen Goodman Quotes

In the end words are just wind.

Thus, we see that one of the obvious origins of human disagreement lies in the use of noises for words.

Our language has become a tired and inefficient thing in the hands of journalists and writers who have nothing to say.

You speak an infinite deal of nothing.

There is only one way to degrade mankind permanently and that is to destroy language.

When language is used without true significance, it loses its purpose as a means of communication and becomes an end in itself.

We gave you a perfectly good language and you f***ed up.

It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched.

A babble of words that no one understands now fills the airwaves, and language loses all meaning as we sink slowly, mindlessly, into herstory rather than history because most rapists are men, aren't they?

Not literature alone, but society itself is wormed and rotten when language ceases to be respected not merely by advertisers and politicians, but by persons of learning and authority.

The language doesn't mean anything anymore, folks. Truth doesn't mean anything anymore.

Sometimes speech is no more than a device for saying nothing - and a neater one than silence.

It is the man determines what is said, not the words.

They stormed and jeered at one another in long meaningless words of about twenty syllables each.

Whenever a man talks he lies, and so far as he talks to himself - that is to say, so far as he thinks, knowing that he thinks - he lies to himself. The only truth in human life is that which is physiological. Speech - this thing that they call a social product - was made for lying.

the modes of speech are scarcely more variable than the modes of silence.

The form of a work of art, which gives speech to their thoughts and is, therefore, their mode of talking, is always somewhat uncertain, like all kinds of speech.

Language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication.

Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday

Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.

Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.

Words must be taken according to the matter whereof they are uttered.

BB-8 [from Star Wars] his accent is so thick. You can't make out a damn word he says.

The most noble and profitable invention of all other, was that of SPEECH, consisting of Names or Appellations, and their Connexion; whereby men register their Thoughts; recall them when they are past; and also declare them one to another for mutuall utility and conversation; without which, there had been amongst men, neither Commonwealth, nor Society, nor Contract, nor Peace, no more than amongst Lyons, Bears, and Wolves.