Joseph Brodsky Quotes

A language is not just words. It's a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It's all embodied in a language.

Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past.

Countries and places have a history, a story, and a culture.

If you want to know what's important to a culture, learn their language.

At home we always converse in Oriya.

For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.

You couldn't have human society without language.

Language is the friendliest of the things from which we cannot escape.

Language is an intrinsic part of who we are and what has, for good or evil, happened to us.

Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.

A nation without a language is a nation without a heart.

The greatest guarantee for the preservation of a person’s identity is language and faith, and all Armenians must carry these two values.

I think music is a great way of helping people to get to know a country's culture.

Culture is central to what makes us human.

Language. By this we build pyramids, fight battles, ordain and administer laws, shape and teach religion, and knit man to man, cultivate each other, and ourselves.

Stories about food are stories about us-our history and our values.

History is the key to citizenship.

...language is not the frosting, it's the cake.

Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss.

Language is the tool of my trade -and I use them all - all the Englishes I grew up with

It is important for all of us to appreciate where we come from and how that history has really shaped us in ways that we might not understand.

Language has no independent existence apart from the people who use it. It is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end of understanding who you are and what society is like.

Language is like songs, like food, like dance-it is the expression of what we think.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Wine has been with civilized man from the beginning.