Language Tolerance Quotes

I think maybe it's time for liberals to not start weeping when I say things like 'retard' or 'illegal alien.'

No one much wants to be belittled, but we tolerate slurs surprisingly often for ourselves; for our lionised children, we demand freedom from insult.

With support jobs moving to China and India, it's not surprising that English-speaking countries' top frustration revolves around the difficulty of understanding customer service representatives. However, even if the level of customer service is exceptional, the extent to which poorly-understood accents trump quality of service speaks to English-speaking customers' growing intolerance of non-native speech, more so than in other countries.

I'm not one of those people who believes in going endlessly around finger wagging and ticking people off for occasional colourful use of language.

I've no problems with cuss words. All of us use them. Those who say they don't are lying. People can tolerate English cuss words but find the Hindi ones a bit revolting.

Whether the film is a Hindi film or in a South Indian language, I don't think it matters.

Most English speakers do not have the writer's short fuse about seeing or hearing their language brutalized. This is the main reason, I suspect, that English is becoming the world's universal tongue: English-speaking natives don't care how badly others speak English as long as they speak it. French, once considered likely to become the world's lingua franca, has lost popularity because those who are born speaking it reject this liberal attitude and become depressed, insulted or insufferable when their language is ill used.

There is no such thing as an ugly accent, like there's no such thing as an ugly flower.

When I go to Colombia or Mexico, I speak Spanish. When I go to Italy, I speak Italian. When I'm in Germany, I speak German. Would I expect them to speak English in these countries? No. I mean, great if they do, but no. Would I be offended if in Spain they say we speak Spanish? No. If I was an immigrant there, no.

There is no linguistic war in Montreal.

That in the captains but a choleric word Which in the soldier is flat blasphemy.

Censors can make a case for zero tolerance in language. They can make the argument that since we don't allow our children to use that language in schools, we also shouldn't give them stories in which it is used.

Let us be cautious in making assertions and critical in examining them, but tolerant in permitting linguistic forms.

Do we want blanks, asterisks and exclamation marks which people can fill in with their own imaginations, or are we prepared and strong enough to tolerate, even if we do not approve, the strong Anglo-Saxon, realistic and vivid language?

We are rearing a generation of kids who are more equitable and more understanding about the existence of language variety and why it is there.

The ethos of 50 years ago was that there was one kind of English that was right and everything else was wrong; one kind of access that was right and everything else was inferior. Then nobody touched language for two generations. When it gradually came back in, we didn't want to go back to what we did in the 1950s. There's a new kind of ethos now.

To stop challenging someone from using anti-gay language simply because they persist in using anti-gay language strikes me as a defeatist approach.