Linguistic Control Quotes

When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’ ’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ ’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.

I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism . . . The only way to react is to get up in the morning and start the day by saying four or five vastly politically incorrect things before breakfast!

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

There is no talent so pernicious as eloquence to those who have it under command.

The only thing I'd rather own than Windows is English. Then I'd be able to charge you an upgrade fee every time I add new letters like N and T.

Control language and you control thought; control thought and you control action; control action and you control the world.

Whoever has power takes over the noun - and the norm - while the less powerful get an adjective.

Words have a magical power. They can bring either the greatest happiness or deepest despair; they can transfer knowledge from teacher to student; words enable the orator to sway his audience and dictate its decisions. Words are capable of arousing the strongest emotions and prompting all men's actions.

Languages that try to disallow idiocy become themselves idiotic.

The abbreviations (e.g. NATO, UN, USSR - E.W.) denote that and only that which is institutionalized in such a way that the transcending connotation is cut off. The meaning is fixed, doctored, loaded. Once it has become an official vocable, constantly repeated in general usage, "sanctioned" by the intellectuals, it has lost all cognitive value and serves merely for recognition of an unquestionable fact.

Reality, the oppressor's tongue.

And I'm working at trying to find a kind of language where I won't be so easily modulated by expectation.

Unconsciously I had discovered the commentator's secret weapon-that so long as you can wield words, it isn't necessary to know what you're talking about.

The English language has been carefully culled to find words feeble in their nature or doubtful in their meaning.

This naming of things is so crucial to possession - a spiritual padlock with the key thrown irretrievably away - that it is a murder, an erasing, and it is not surprising that when people have felt themselves prey to it (conquest), among their first acts of liberation is to change their names.

Words were one of the most powerful forces known— or unknown— to man. The Most High had created this world with His words. And humans, who had been fashioned in His image, could direct the entire course of their lives with their words, their mouths as the rudder on a ship, as the bridle on a horse. They produced with their words. They destroyed with their words.

I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.

The mother tongue is propaganda.

The speaker does not own the words he utters, or control their effect.

You will eat this and go to sleep, so your pronouns get their antecedents back.

If the world is made of language, then you can hack it in the sense that you can hack code.

Standard English is very imperialistic, controlled, and precise; it's not got a lot of funk or soul to it.

If you can not master your language you must be it's slave.

The human tongue is a beast that few can master.

The art of those who govern consists above all in the science of employing words.