If language is intimately related to being human, then when we study language we are, to a remarkable degree, studying human nature.

Grammar is not a set of rules; it is something inherent in the language, and language cannot exist without it. It can be discovered, but not invented.

The truth seems to be that they [teachers of grammar] were victims of a mighty hoax, one of those true belly-rumbling impostures which a workaday world can but seldom afford.

Amoebas, once they have themselves well pulled in two, go their ways-they practice divorce, but no remarriage.

Jazz was formerly a crude term for indulging in an action which in polite society is referred to, if at all, only with such vague Latin terms as intercourse and cohabitation.

Babies and language are the essential ingredients of civilization, and speakers of language no more know where it came from than babies know where they come from.

You and I who read and write books have very little effect upon language. We may think about it, write about it, and read about it, but it goes on without us, or in spite of us.

Language is a living thing. It must survive in men's minds and on their tongues if it survives at all.

Man can be defined, if one wishes, as a languag-ized mammal.

Quite naturally, scholars assumed that Latin grammar was not merely Latin grammar, but that it was grammar itself. They borrowed it and made the most of it.

Civilization could not exist until there was written language, because without written language no generation could bequeath to succeeding generations anything but its simpler findings.

The perfect life is not worth living. There would be nothing to look forward to. The imperfect life is perfect.

Would it be enough to rock on a stormless sea with each our separate memories tuned to the state of the sinking sun?

Book means fly in the sky, cross the desert, without wing without water.

In the Russian experience, although the Russian state is oppressive, it is their state, it is part of their fabric, and so the relation between Russian citizens and their state is complicated.

The people's voice is odd, It is, and it is not, the voice of God.

No one realized that the pumps that delivered fuel to the emergency generators were electric.

I can't believe I survived, not only my life, but I am still playing football 'cause half of those eight or nine years I don't even remember.

It is the chief characteristic of the religion of science that it works.

It's good to stay as close to real life as you can, and then kind of dress it up.

And believe it or not, she has a phone and everything. She stopped using smoking signals last year.