Culture Quote by Robert Lane Greene

“One common function of arguments about language is to stand in for arguments on subjects people are reluctant to broach more directly.”

— Deborah Cameron

“The point in all this is that language is a handy whipping boy to summon and belabor when we have failed in some serious…

— Chinua Achebe

“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the…

— George Orwell

“--and in fact, we humans need conflict just like we need language, to help us define who we are.”

— Mark Stephen Meadows

“Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks they can talk about language.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Language could be used as an instrument of control, a way of establishing hierarchies that suggest one set of people is better or more…

— David Crow

“Language exists to conceal true thought.”

— Charles Talleyrand

“Political language . . . is designed to make its lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

— George Orwell

“To perceive how language works, what pitfalls it conceals, what its possibilities are, is to comprehend a crucial aspect of the complicated business of…

— S.I. Hayakawa

The new, old, and constantly changing language of politics is a lexicon of conflict and drama?ridicule and reproach?pleading and persuasion.

— William Safire

“The only way to defend language is to attack it....' - Proust. Every good writer in history had, in order to ensure adequate expression,…

— Alain de Botton

“A language brings with it a mass of perceptions, clichés, judgements and inspirations.”

— Nicholas Ostler