Octavio Paz Quotes

The corrosion of our public language reflects deep pathologies — societal, cultural, economic — in the body politic.

Every individual or national degeneration is immediately revealed by a directly proportional degradation in language.

There's been cultural rot since there's been culture.

Expressing criticism of society is not being a grouch.

I discovered very quickly that criticism is a form of optimism, and that when you are silent about the shortcomings of your society, you're very pessimistic about that society. And it's only when you speak truthfully about it that you show your faith in that society.

We gave you a perfectly good language and you f***ed up.

Not literature alone, but society itself is wormed and rotten when language ceases to be respected not merely by advertisers and politicians, but by persons of learning and authority.

The fact is that my native land is a prey to barbarism, that in it men's only God is their belly, that they live only for the present, and that the richer a man is the holier he is held to be.

Society does not love its unmaskers.

In the acceptance of depravity the sense of the past is most truly captured. What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance? Corruption is the Age of Time.

America is the first culture in jeopardy of amusing itself to death.

How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.

To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.

At a time when pimpery, lick-spittlery, and picking the public's pocket are the order of the day - indeed, officially proclaimed as virtue - the poet must play the madcap to keep his balance. And ours.

Hip-Hop is Dead cause America is dead culturally.

Sorry, Sage. Last I checked, you aren’t an expert in social matters..." "At least I take action. You? You let the world go by without you. You have no spine. You don’t fight back." “You don’t know the first thing about me, Adrian Ivashkov. I fight back plenty.

Every new fad or fashion at once has its denouncers from the pulpit, platform, professor's chair.

If our language is watered down, then mankind becomes less human, and less free.

Great nations do not succumb through lost wars, but rather through racial decay and the destruction of their internal order.

Adjectives are the curse of America.

Hyperbole expands in societies where articulateness atrophies.

A playwright has a responsibility in his society not to aid it, or comfort it, but to comment and criticize it.

Tremendous interest in the superficial is very characteristic of cultures in decline.

When language in common use in any country becomes irregular and depraved, it is followed by their ruin and degradation. For what do terms used without skill or meaning, which are at once corrupt and misapplied, denote but a people listless, supine, and ripe for servitude?

The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language.