"People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate……" — Steven Pinker

More Dictionaries Quotes

This quote is filed under Dictionaries Quotes, one of 35 quotes in that category. Here are a few more:

• I'm very sensitive to the English language. I studied the dictionary obsessively when I was a kid and collect old… — Drew Barrymore
• At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• Beware of charisma . . . Representative Men; was Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1850 phrase for the great men in a… — Daniel J. Boorstin
• I can't describe the feeling when I go down - it's down down down and there's never going to be… — John Marsden
• And that brings us to tonight's word: Truthiness. Now I'm sure some of the word-police, the 'wordanistas' over at Websters,… — Stephen Colbert
• I like everything that has no style: dictionaries, photographs, nature, myself and my paintings. (Because style is violent, and I… — Gerhard Richter
• When a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce in the same individual, we have the best possible condition for… — William James
• The makers of dictionaries are dependent upon specialists for their definitions. A specialist's definition may be true or it may… — Benjamin Tucker
• Many moons ago dictionaries of quotations may have been less needed than they are today. In those good/bad old days,… — Joseph Epstein
• Greek was very much a live language, and a language still unconscious of grammar, not, like ours, dominated by definitions… — Gilbert Murray
• Somebody told a lie one day. They couched it in language. They made everything Black ugly and evil. Look in… — Martin Luther King, Jr.
• What advice do you have for writers working on their first novels?If you feel called to write a book, consider… — Kathleen Grissom

See all 35 Dictionaries Quotes »