"Language is the archives of history."

Ralph Waldo Emerson
 

"I also grew up, thankfully, with a love of language. That may have happened because I was bilingual at an early age. I stopped speaking Chinese when I was five, but I loved words."

Amy Tan
 

"Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all."

Walt Whitman
 

"Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction."

Gregory Bateson
 

"A language presupposes that all the individual users possess the organs."

Ferdinand de Saussure
 

"The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition."

Marilyn Hacker
 

"Language is like a crack'd kettle on which we beat out tunes to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity."

Gustave Flaubert
 

"A standard international language should not only be simple, regular, and logical, but also rich and creative."

Edward Sapir
 

"Language is a virus from outer space."

William S. Burroughs
 

"A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state."

Joseph Brodsky