Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands, and goes to work.

Language is the archives of history.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.

What a glut of books! Who can read them? As already, we shall have a vast chaos and confusion of books; we are oppressed with them, our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning.

A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.

Slang is as old as speech and the congregating together of people in cities. It is the result of crowding and excitement and artificial life.

I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it—yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don’t give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.

I have often repented speaking, but never of holding my tongue.

Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.

Man is the one name belonging to every nation upon earth: there is one soul and many tongues, one spirit and various sounds; every country has its own speech, but the subjects of speech are common to all.

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

It is a luxury to be understood.