Like so many of his successors in the language-crank world today, though, (Jonathan) Swift not only loathes (the) banal and common change (language); he ascribes it to moral failing.
I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men."" Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes,...
-
Jane Austen
What it means to be human is to bring up your children in safety, educate them, keep them healthy, teach them how to care for themselves and others, allow them to develop in their own way among adults who are sane and responsibile, who know...
-
Jeanette Winterson
The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.
-
Michel Legrand
Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire - it tells you how to desire.
-
Unknown
Being vegan is easy. Are there social pressures that encourage you to continue to eat, wear, and use animal products? Of course there are. But in a patriarchal, racist, homophobic, and ableist society, there are social pressures to participate and engage in sexism, racism, homophobia,...
-
Gary L. Francione
More Quotes By Robert Lane Greene
Though it's true that (dictionary-maker Samuel) Johnson sometimes seem to feel that the language was in decline, he didn't rail against it with (Jonathan) Swift's anger. Instead, he hoped the example of his dictionary would temper that change by providing a distinguished literary example
Thousands of miles from Georgia, beginning that night in England, my dad became a foreign-language speaker to me — and I was utterly charmed by it. I found the foreigner in myself.
Standard languages are inventions, most of them confined to a recent period in human history. They are codes that give access not to clear thinking and basic decency but to the structured parts of our lives such as job interviews, political speeches, literary essays, novels,...
Arguments about language are usually arguments about politics, disguised and channeled through one of our most distinctive markers of identity.
There is really only one way to learn good writing: good reading and extensive writing and revising.
