Always aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed. Always aim at purifying your thoughts and everything will be well.

- Mohandas K. Gandhi

True eloquence consists in saying all that is necessary, and nothing but what is necessary.

- Heinrich Heine

Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.

- William Butler Yeats

We tend to look through language and not realize how much power language has.

- Deborah Tannen

The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them.

- Stephen King

It's our tendency to approach every problem as if it were a fight between two sides. We see it in headlines that are always using metaphors for war. It's a general atmosphere of animosity and contention that has taken over our public discourse.

- Deborah Tannen

Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.

- Quentin Crisp

We are more connected than ever before, more able to spread our ideas and beliefs, our anger and fears. As we exercise the right to advocate our views, and as we animate our supporters, we must all assume responsibility for our words and actions before they enter a vast echo chamber and reach those both serious and delirious, connected and unhinged.

- Bill Clinton

Talking is like playing on the harp; there is as much in laying the hands on the strings to stop their vibration as in twanging them to bring out their music.

- Oliver Wendell Holmes

When we walk away from global warming, Kyoto, when we are irresponsibly slow in moving toward AIDS in Africa, when we don't advance and live up to our own rhetoric and standards, we set a terrible message of duplicity and hypocrisy.

- John Kerry

For the beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.

- Thomas Mann

But behavior in the human being is sometimes a defense, a way of concealing motives and thoughts, as language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication.

- Abraham Maslow

If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy.

- Ralph Ellison

[The English language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

- George Orwell

The meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

- Gustave Flaubert



England and America are two countries divided by a common language.

- George Bernard Shaw



By studying the principles of symbolism we can learn not to be unconsciously influenced by language, and in this way can escape a host of erroneous notions.

- Bertrand Russell



If you come from, say, the northeastern part of the United States when you're listening you need to show you're alive. You need to talk along. That's the way you show you're interested. But in many parts of the United States if you talk along, that's rude, that's interruption. Now, we all agree interruption is rude. But we don't agree on what constitutes an interruption.

- Deborah Tannen



If someone in your life talked to you the way you talk to yourself, you would have left them long ago.

- Carla Gordon



Speak when you are angry -- and you'll make the best speech you'll ever regret.

- Laurence J. Peter



We learn what we have said from those who listen to our speaking.

- Kenneth Patton



Arguments over grammar and style are often as fierce as those over IBM versus Mac, and as fruitless as Coke versus Pepsi and boxers versus briefs.

- Jack Lynch



English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education -- sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street.

- E. B. White



Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.

- Aldous Huxley



England and America are two countries divided by a common language.

- George Bernard Shaw



Kindness in words creates confidence.
Kindness in thinking creates profundity.
Kindness in giving creates love.

- Laozi (Lao Tzu, Lao Tse, Lao Tsu)



I personally think we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.

- Jane Wagner



The quality of our thoughts is bordered on all sides by our facility with language.

- J. Michael Straczynski



Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson