Vocabulary Quotes

Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of the vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds. (Dorothy L. Sayers)
Men make angry music and it's called rock-and-roll; women include anger in their vocabulary and suddenly they're angry and militant. View quote
Ani DiFranco
"Stay" is a charming word in a friend's vocabulary. View quote
Louisa May Alcott
If you're not ready to die for it, put the word 'freedom' out of your vocabulary. View quote
Malcolm X
Retirement is not in my vocabulary. They aren't going to get rid of me that way. View quote
Betty White
Being a mother gives you an incredible feeling of empowerment, you think if I can go through such pain and that level of sleep and still operate and not be grumpy you can do anything. It can be quite scary, you can't function your brain, forget your vocabulary. View quote
Anna Friel
As you can appreciate over my lifetime I've developed a large vocabulary of sounds each requiring certain physical techniques often combined with a specific effect box. View quote
Adrian Belew
It's like learning a language; you can't speak a language fluently until you find out who you are in that language, and that has as much to do with your body as it does with vocabulary and grammar. View quote
Fred Frith
The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition. View quote
Marilyn Hacker
When I wear high heels I have a great vocabulary and I speak in paragraphs. I'm more eloquent. I plan to wear them more often. View quote
Meg Ryan
Losing is not in my vocabulary. (Ruud van Nistelrooy)
Words are not even within me. They're not in my vocabulary to really express the kind of feeling that I had. View quote
Tanya Tucker
One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die. View quote
Evelyn Waugh
Being a man given to oratory and high principles, he enjoyed the sound of his own vocabulary and the warmth of his own virtue. View quote
Sinclair Lewis
Equity knows no difference of sex. In its vocabulary the word man must be understood in a generic, and not in a specific sense. View quote
Herbert Spencer
The minute we leave south Lebanon we will have to erase the word Hezbollah from our vocabulary, because the whole idea of the State of Israel versus Hezbollah was sheer folly from the outset. It most certainly no longer will be relevant when Israel returns to her internationally recognized northern border. View quote
Amos Oz
We live in a time when the words impossible and unsolvable are no longer part of the scientific community's vocabulary. Each day we move closer to trials that will not just minimize the symptoms of disease and injury but eliminate them. View quote
Christopher Reeve
It is the relentless onward march of the texters, the SMS (Short Message Service) vandals who are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours 800 years ago.They are destroying it: pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary. And they must be stopped. View quote
John Humphrys
From any vocabulary of ideas we can build other ideas by formal combinations of signs. But not any set of ideas will be instructive. One must have the right ideas. View quote
Ian Hacking
[I]n the male sexual lexicon, which is the vocabulary of power, erotica is simply high-class pornography: better produced, better conceived, better executed, better packaged, designed for a better class of consumer. As with the call girl and the streetwalker, one is turned out better but both are produced by the same system of sexual values and both perform the same sexual service. View quote
Andrea Dworkin
I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company. (Gaston Bachelard)
Sound is the vocabulary of nature... noises are as well articulated as the words in a dictionary... Opposing the world of sound is the world of music. View quote
Pierre Schaeffer
I've actually become much, much dumber through being married and having these children. I find that I'm not half as sharp that I once was. I can't even help them with their 4th and 5th grade vocabulary and math work at this point. View quote
Patrick Warburton
Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt. View quote
José Saramago
Do not confuse understanding with a larger vocabulary, sacred writings are beneficial in stimulating desire for inward realization, if one stanza at a time is slowly assimilated. Continual intellectual study results in vanity and the false satisfaction of an undigested knowledge. View quote
Yukteswar Giri