Linguists Quotes

• If we don't believe in free expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.

  Noam Chomsky

  Inspirational, Relationship, Freedom

  Interview with John Pilger on BBC's "The Late Show", November 25, 1992.

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• I have my own vocabulary. I love linguistics. That surprises people.

  Matthew McConaughey

  Vocabulary, People, Surprise

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• I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism.

  P. D. James

  War, Believe, Political

  FaceBook post by P.D. James from Oct 30, 2011

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• Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.

  Benjamin Lee Whorf

  Communication, Thinking, Shapes

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• Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations.

  Edward Sapir

  Art, Work, Generations

  Edward Sapir (2014). “Language”, p.235, Cambridge University Press

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• Logic and mathematics are nothing but specialised linguistic structures.

  Jean Piaget

  Sensual, Logic, Mathematics

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• Language doesn't belong to grammarians, linguists, wordsmiths, writers, or editors. It belongs to the people who use it. It goes where people want it to go, and, like a balky mule, you can't make it go where it doesn't want to go.

  Rosalie Maggio

  Editors, People, Want

  Rosalie Maggio, The Women's Media Center (2015). “Unspinning the Spin: The Women's Media Center Guide to Fair and Accurate Language”, p.30, Open Road Media

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• It is only since linguistics has become more aware of its object of study, i.e. perceives the whole extent of it, that it is evident that this science can make a contribution to a range of studies that will be of interest to almost anyone.

  Ferdinand de Saussure

  Study, Range, Interest

  "Saussure's Third Course of Lectures on General Linghuistics (1910-1911)" by Ferdinand de Saussure, Pergamon Press, www.marxists.org. 1993.

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• Languages are no more than the keys of Sciences. He who despises one, slights the other.

  Jean de la Bruyere

  Keys, Language, Despise

  "The Characters or Manners of the Present Age". Book by Jean de La Bruyère, Chapter XII, 1688.

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• Linguistics will have to recognise laws operating universally in language, and in a strictly rational manner, separating general phenomena from those restricted to one branch of languages or another.

  Ferdinand de Saussure

  Law, Branches, Language

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• A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas...

  Ferdinand de Saussure

  Ideas, Differences, Sound

  "Course in General Linguistics" by Ferdinand de Saussure, edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, translated by Wade Baskin, New York : Philosophical Library, (p. 120), 1959.

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• If words are not things, or maps are not the actual territory, then, obviously, the only possible link between the objective world and the linguistic world is found in structure, and structure alone.

  Alfred Korzybski

  World, Maps, Links

  Alfred Korzybski (1958). “Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics”, p.61, Institute of GS

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• Everything is Greek, when it is more shameful to be ignorant of Latin.

  Juvenal

  Latin, Greek, Ignorant

  "Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations" by Jehiel Keeler Hoyt, p. 460, Satires, VI, line 187, 1922.

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• The story of English spelling is the story of thousands of people - some well-known, most totally unknown - who left a permanent linguistic fingerprint on our orthography.

  David Crystal

  People, Stories, Well Known

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• Philologists, who chase A painting syllable through time and space Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark, To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's Ark.

  William Cowper

  Home, Dark, Space

  "Retirement" l. 691 (1782)

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• Although many texters enjoy breaking linguistic rules, they also know they need to be understood.

  David Crystal

  Needs, Enjoy, Understood

  "2b or not 2b?" by David Crystal, www.theguardian.com. July 4, 2008.

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• Egad, I think the interpreter is the hardest to be understood of the two!

  Richard Brinsley Sheridan

  Thinking, Two, Understanding

  'The Critic' (1779) act 1, sc. 2

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• In general, the philological movement opened up countless sources relevant to linguistic issues, treating them in quite a different spirit from traditional grammar; for instance, the study of inscriptions and their language. But not yet in the spirit of linguistics.

  Ferdinand de Saussure

  Issues, Different, Movement

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• I mean, it’s true, nobody talks about them, but when you bring it up, the idea that you have to rent yourself to somebody and follow their orders, and that they own and you work there, and you built it but you don’t own it, that’s a highly unnatural notion. You don’t have to study any complicated theories to see that this is an attack on human dignity.

  Noam Chomsky

  Respect, Work, Mean

  Noam Chomsky (2013). “On Anarchism”, p.109, New Press, The

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• The critical principle demanded an examination, for instance, of the contribution of different periods, thus to some extent embarking on historical linguistics.

  Ferdinand de Saussure

  Historical, Principles, Different

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• It is one of the aims of linguistics to define itself, to recognise what belongs within its domain. In those cases where it relies upon psychology, it will do so indirectly, remaining independent.

  Ferdinand de Saussure

  Independent, Rely Upon, Psychology

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• Knowledge never springs from faith. It springs from doubt.

  Humayun Azad

  Inspirational, Faith, Spring

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• A captured pirate was brought before Alexander the Great. “How dare you molest the sea?” asked Alexander. “How dare you molest the whole world?” the pirate replied, and continued: “Because I do it with a little ship only, I am called a thief; you, doing it with a great navy, are called an emperor.

  Noam Chomsky

  Sea, Pirate, Navy

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• You don't talk to a linguist without having what you say taken down and used in evidence against you at some point in time.

  David Crystal

  Taken, Down And, Used

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• The job of the linguist, like that of the biologist or the botanist, is not to tell us how nature should behave, or what its creations should look like, but to describe those creations in all their messy glory and try to figure out what they can teach us about life, the world, and, especially in the case of linguistics, the workings of the human mind.

  Arika Okrent

  Jobs, Mind, Trying

  Arika Okrent (2009). “In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language”, p.5, Spiegel & Grau

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