language distortion Quotes

Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

George Orwell once blamed the demise of the English language on politics. It's quite possible he never read a prospectus.

How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!

I know you lawyers can with ease, Twist words and meanings as you please; That language, by your skill made pliant, Will bend to favour every client; That 'tis the fee directs the sense, To make out either side's pretense.

Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.

Among the many evils which prevail under the sun, the abuse of words is not the least considerable. By the influence of time, and the perversion of fashion, the plainest and most unequivocal may be so altered, as to have a meaning assigned them almost diametrically opposite to their original signification.

I am indeed not her fool, but her corrupter of words. (Act III, sc. I, 37-38)

By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.

I'm talking to a journalist and I really have nothing to say anymore, this is already uncomfortable. I feel the pain coming already. The brutal pain, when one day I should read your edit of whatever I say, because no matter what I say, no matter how I say it, no matter its tone, its frequency range, its decibel level or the way in which I put the words together, no matter my intentions and no matter the truth. What I'll read one day will be a chastised, manipulated abortion of your misunderstandings, your manipulations, your agenda and your amateur use of the English language.

Unfaithful to their meanings, words perturb our perturb our powers of reason ... the only safe words are our words.

I've always been suspicious of collective truths. I think an idea is true when it hasn't been put into words and that the moment it's put into words it becomes exaggerated. Because the moment it's put into words there's an abuse, an excess in the expression of the idea that makes it false.

In our charade with ourselves we pretend that our war is not really war. We have changed the name of the War Department to the Defense Department and call a whole class of nuclear missiles Peace Keepers!

Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.

All over the world today, not just in the totalitarian countries, assiduous functionaries in Ministries of Truth are clubbing history dumb and rendering language insensible.

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

No matter what your native tongue is, no matter what part of the world you're from, if your native tongue is distorted with an accent, somehow that's always funny.

Translated literature can be fascinating. There's something so intriguing about reading the text second hand - a piece of prose that has already been through an extra filter, another consciousness, in the guise of the translator. Some of my favorite writers who have written in English were doing so without English being their first language, so there's a sense of distance or of distortion there, too. Conrad. Nabokov. These writers were employing English in interesting ways.

I think, as we go through life, we can sometimes, while still staying essentially true to ourselves, pick up mannerisms or modes of expression that are like curlicues. And there was a lot of that that I recognized sometimes. And I remembered, sometimes dimly, why those phrases felt so tasty to me, why that particular curl felt so good to me. But from my point of view now, it was almost inaccurate. It changed the meaning of what I was saying in a way that it seemed like a distortion.