Linguistic Determinism Quotes

It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.

The words of language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images.

In other words, the man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth.

Nothing exists except through language.

Was it really so far-fetched to think that words had a way of shaping a person's whole life?

Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.

We don't realize how much we create reality through language. If we say that life is hard, it will be hard.

Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history.

Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.

Words can carry any burden we wish. All that's required is agreement and a tradition upon which to build.

Language is very powerful. Language does not just describe reality. Language creates the reality it describes.

I believe that the development of language - of naming, categorization, conceptualization - destroys our ability to see as we age.

Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.

We think in language. The quality of our thoughts and ideas can only be as good as the quality of our language.

Language creates reality. Words have power. Speak always to create joy.

Ideas do not exist separately from language.

Language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body, stamping it and violently shaping it.

Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints --the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk --we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.

Language is generated by the intellect and generates the intellect.

Language does our thinking for us.

Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.

Language, as symbol, determines much of the nature and quality of our experience.

Does a name stick because it suits a man or does the man, unconsciously, evolve into his name?

A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language.

Every language having a structure, by the very nature of language, reflects in its own structure that of the world as assumed by those who evolved the language. In other words, we read unconsciously into the world the structure of the language we use.