Language Manipulation Quotes

Rhetoric, which is the use of language to inform or persuade, is very important in shaping public opinion. We are very easily fooled by language and how it is used by others.

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.’ ’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ ’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.

Language, philosophy, and science are interwoven into the design of words, which are manipulated to create surprising illusions.

This country is rich with awful things to say about everybody. There's a slur for you and a slur for me - more than one. And because we're terrified of dealing with them head on, we've made them just as easy to warp and defang.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible... Thus, political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness... Political language [is] designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.

God gave humans language so they could conceal their thoughts from one another.

The best word shakers were the ones who understood the true power of words. They were the ones who could climb the highest. One such word shaker was a small, skinny girl. She was renowned as the best word shaker of her region because she knew how powerless a person could be WITHOUT words.

Speech was given to man to disguise his thoughts.

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

You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.

It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.

True to their history, the English are very domineering and have manipulated it in different ways. I wouldn't say that there was an original, but there is a lot of expurgation in some of the Victorian translations, and there's a lot of additional salacious nonsense in some of them, too. I also like the early French one, much-derided for being fanciful but which is actually very elegantly done. It's very big, very capacious.

Thou art a retailer of phrases, and dost deal in remnants of remnants.

Of course, you can say it backwards, which is dociousaliexpilisticfragicalirupus, but that's going a bit too far, don't you think?

Ironically, as some people become harder, they use softer words to describe dark deeds. This, too, is part of being sedated by secularism. Needless abortion, for instance, is a "reproductive health procedure, . . ." "Illegitimacy" gives way to the wholly sanitized words "non-marital birth" or "alternative parenting."

Is not anyone with any degree of mental honesty conscious of telling lies all day long, both in talking and writing, simply because lies will fall into artistic shape when truth will not?

The poet, by composing poems, uses a language that is neither dead nor living, that few people speak, and few people understand We are the servants of an unknown force that lives within us, manipulates us, and dictates this language to us.

People call him a terrorist, but you can use language to do many things and say many things about people, but John Brown was a hero.

He is, I think, already pondering a magisterial project: that of buggering the English language, the ultimate revenge of the colonialised.

Words are seductive and dangerous material, to be used with caution.

Try not to be either intimidated by or a captive of jargon. Even though it's language, and language is about communication, it often exists actually to obfuscate and to control power and not to communicate.

We don't declare war any more, we declare national defense.

The kind of accidents you prefer to call...accidents.

Linguistic supersizing is on the increase, and it may show the influence of advertising-speak and corporate jargon on language, in which everything needs to be hyped to get noticed. It means that some of our greatest words are losing their power.

I have always been thinking about the sounds and shades and aromas of words - fitting them together or disrupting their customary march - more or less every second of my life, waking and sleeping.