He that travelleth into a country before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel.

FRANCIS BACON, Essays

High thoughts must have high language.

ARISTOPHANES, The Frogs

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

GEORGE ORWELL, The Lion and the Unicorn

The true use of speech is not so much to express our wants as to conceal them.

OLIVER GOLDSMITH, Essays

JEAN GENET, The Blacks

Language is called the garment of thought: however, it should rather be, language is the flesh-garment, the body, of thought.

THOMAS CARLYLE, Sartor Resartus

Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.

Language is fossil poetry.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Essays

Articulate words are a harsh clamor and dissonance. When man arrives at his highest perfection, he will again be dumb! for I suppose he was dumb at the Creation, and must go round an entire circle in order to return to that blessed state.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, American Note-Books, Apr. 1841

Regarding language as an apparatus of symbols for the conveyance of thought, we may say that, as in a mechanical apparatus, the more simple and the better arranged its parts, the greater will be the effect produced.

HERBERT SPENCER, The Philosophy of Style

How truly language must be regarded as a hindrance to thought, though the necessary instrument of it, we shall clearly perceive on remembering the comparative force with which simple ideas are communicated by signs. To say, "Leave the room," is less expressive than to point to the door. Place a finger on the lips is more forcible than whispering, "Do not speak." A beck of the hand is better than, "Come here." No phrase can convey the idea of surprise so vividly as opening the eyes and raising the eyebrows. A shrug of the shoulders would lose much by translation into words.

HERBERT SPENCER, The Philosophy of Style

A dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences.

A language has very little that is arbitrary in it, very little betokening the conscious power and action of man. It owes its origin, not to the thoughts and the will of individuals, but to an instinct actuating a whole people: it expresses what is common to them all: it has sprung out of their universal wants, and lives in their hearts. But after a while in intellectual aristocracy come forward, and frame a new language of their own. The princes and lords of thought shoot forth their winged words into regions beyond the scan of the people. They require a gold coinage, in addition to the common currency.

Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses them for a thousand different ends.

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

GEORGE ORWELL, The English People