Vocabulary Quotes - page 5
[Rock 'n' roll] really is not given to thinking - and resents thinking. Which I believe is the big error of rock 'n' roll. It's always aspired to be the music of the working class. And it's never been looked upon as a vocabulary for art and artistic thinking... We have to be able to expand the vocabulary to express more complex thoughts.
Paul Simon
Artsakh cannot be a part of Azerbaijan...if like in 1997 they want to become a friend of Azerbaijan on the price of Nagorno-Karabakh, I do not agree with that. In that case, what answer can we give to the families of victims of the Karabakh movement and to those who have become disabled. Why did their sons fight? And about Turkey, we cannot leave the word genocide out of our vocabulary and forget about the 1.5 million victims.
Mikael Harutyunyan
I was wise to quit writing for the Sun back in January, 1941, for it was obvious by then that Roosevelt would horn into the war soon or late, and I knew by bitter experience in the last war that I'd be throttled at once. Since then I have thought out many likely articles, but not one of them has been printable. In these days, indeed, my very vocabulary is prohibited. I couldn't so much as mention Roosevelt or Churchill or any of the other frauds without having to face a savage official onslaught, with all blows directed below the belt. The common notion that free speech prevails in the United States always makes me laugh.
H. L. Mencken
We speak still of "sunrise" and "sunset." We do so as if the Copernican model of the solar system had not replaced, ineradicably, the Ptolemaic. Vacant metaphors, eroded figures of speech, inhabit our vocabulary and grammar. They are caught, tenaciously, in the scaffolding and recesses of our common parlance. There they rattle about like old rags or ghosts in the attic.
George Steiner
Science has become too complex to affirm the existence of universal truths, but it strives for nothing else, and disputes the problem, within its own limits, almost as earnestly as in the twelfth century, when the whole field of human and superhuman activity was shut between these barriers of Substance, Universals, and Particulars. Little has changed except the vocabulary and the method.
Henry Adams
Practise silence, for the voice of God can be heard in the region of your heart only when the tongue and the inner storm are stilled, and the waves (of the mind) are calmed. There will be no temptation for others to shout when you talk to them in whispers. Set the level of the tone yourself: as low as possible, as high as necessary to reach the outermost boundary of the circle you are addressing. Conserve sound, since it is the treasure of the element ether (Akasa), an emanation from God Himself. Reason can prevail only when the arguments are advanced without the whipping up of sound. Silence is the speech of the spiritual seeker. Soft speech is the expression of genuine love. Hate screeches; fear squeals; conceit trumpets; but love sings lullabies, it soothes, it applies balm. Practise the vocabulary of love; unlearn the language of hate and contempt.
Sathya Sai Baba
Now my humble fear is that this double training, in language as well as in thought, imposes somewhat too heavy a burden upon the young, especially when, at the age of three years old, they are taken from the maternal care and taught to unlearn the old language - except for the purpose of repeating it in the presence of their Mothers and Nurses - and to learn the vocabulary and idiom of science. Already methinks I discern a weakness in the grasp of mathematical truth at the present time as compared with the more robust intellect of our ancestors three hundred years ago.
Edwin Abbott Abbott
These buildings are just right for the excesses of post-modernism -- decorative, frivolous -- serving to obviously excite and attract -- every feature using the architectural vocabulary freely without too much regard for serious function -- open glass atriums and shining metals and expensive and artificial marbles, zany letterings and excess neon.
Peter Greenaway
I had by this time heard a number of his public speeches and was beginning to understand the pattern of their appeal. The first secret lay in his choice of words. Every generation develops its own vocabulary of catchwords and phrases, and these date thoughts and utterances. My own father talked like a contemporary of Bismarck, the people of my own age bore the stamp of Wilhelm II, but Hitler had caught the casual camaraderie of the trenches, and without stooping to slang, except for special effects, managed to talk like a member of his audience. In describing the difficulties of the housewife without enough money to buy the buy the food her family needed in the Viktualien Market he would produce just the phrases she would have used herself to describe her difficulties, if she had been able to formulate them. Where other national orators gave the painful impression of talking down to their audience, he had his priceless gift of expressing exactly their own thoughts.
Ernst Hanfstaengl
Man's urge for change and his need for stability have always balanced and checked each other, and our current vocabulary, which distinguishes between two factions, the progressives and the conservatives, indicates a state of affairs in which this balance has been thrown out of order. No civilization - the man-made artifact to house successive generations - would ever have been possible without a framework of stability, to provide the wherein for the flux of change. Foremost among the stabilizing factors, more enduring than customs, manners and traditions, are the legal systems that regulate our life in the world and our daily affairs with each other.
Hannah Arendt
The gist of my argument is that men like Kraepelin, Bleuler and Freud were not what they claimed or seem to be-namely, physicians or medical investigators; they were, in fact, religious-political leaders and conquerors. Instead of discovering new diseases, they extended, through psychiatry, the imagery, vocabulary, jurisdiction, and hence the territory of medicine to what they were not, and are not, diseases in the original Virchowian sense.
Thomas Szasz
There must be a solidifying of our populations into one compact whole. The various indigenous tribes must be brought into the body politic, taught the duties and responsibilities of civilized government. Into them must be infused or inculcated an appreciative knowledge and understanding of hopes and aspirations of the Fathers who established this nation. There should be no words known in our National Vocabulary of Speech or even of thought as "Americo-Liberian"; "the country-man"; "the new-comer"; "the Sierra Leone man"; or such like terms of designating the various elements of our population.
Charles D. B. King
Although I came to doubt all revelation, I can never accept the idea that the Universe is a physical or chemical accident, a result of blind evolution. Even though I learned to recognize the lies, the clichés and the idolatries of the human mind, I still cling to some truths which I think all of us might accept some day. There must be a way for man to attain all possible pleasures, all the powers and knowledge that nature can grant him, and still serve God - a God who speaks in deeds, not in words, and whose vocabulary is the Cosmos.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
