Lexicon Quotes

Liberal' comes from the Latin liberalis, which means pertaining to a free man. In politics, to be liberal is to want to extend democracy through change and reform. One can see why the word had to be erased from our political lexicon. (Gore Vidal)
[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.
Andrea Dworkin
If the Russian word "perestroika" has easily entered the international lexicon, this is due to more than just interest in what is going on in the Soviet Union. Now the whole world needs restructuring, i. e. progressive development, a fundamental change.
Mikhail Gorbachev
In the lexicon of youth which fate reserves for a bright manhood, there is no such word as fail.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
In the lexicon of the political class, the word "sacrifice" means that the citizens are supposed to mail even more of their income to Washington so that the political class will not have to sacrifice the pleasure of spending it.
George Will
Hope will come with the return of the language of class conflict and rebellion, language that has been purged from the lexicon of the liberal class. This does not mean we have to agree with Karl Marx, who advocated violence and whose worship of the state as a utopian mechanism led to another form of working class enslavement, but we have to learn again to speak in the vocabulary Marx employed. We have to grasp, as Marx and Adam Smith did, that corporations are not concerned with the common good.
Chris Hedges
Drunk, Jane spoke as though she were Nancy Drew. I was a fool for a girl with a dainty lexicon.
Michael Chabon
Almost everything in the pop culture lexicon of vampirism is basically fiction-and fiction is the art of telling entertaining lies for money.
Charles Stross
This legible lesson, this ritual recording, must be repeated as often as possible; the punishments must be a school rather than a festival; an ever-open book rather than a ceremony. The duration that makes the punishment effective for the guilty is also useful for the spectators. They must be able to consult at each moment the permanent lexicon of crime and punishment. A secret punishment is a punishment half wasted. Children should be allowed to come to the places where the penalty is being carried out; there they will attend their classes in civics. And grown men will periodically relearn the laws. Let us conceive of places of punishment as a Garden of the Laws that families would visit on Sundays.
Michel Foucault
We, in the UAE, have no such word as "impossible”; it does not exist in our lexicon. Such a word is used by the lazy and the weak, who fear challenges and progress. When one doubts his potential and capabilities as well as his confidence, he will lose the compass that leads him to success and excellence, thus failing to achieve his goal. I require you, youth, to insist on number one.
Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum
For millennia, the dialectic of vilification and deification and, more generally, of invalidation and validation-excluding the individual from the group as an evil outsider or including him in it as a member in good standing-was cast in the imagery and rhetoric of magic and religion. ... With the decline of the religious world view and the ascent of the scientific method during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the religious rhetoric of validation and invalidation was gradually replaced by the scientific. One of the most dramatic results of this transformation is the lexicon of psychiatric diagnoses functioning as a powerful, but largely unacknowledged, rhetoric of rejection and stigmatization. (Thomas Szasz)
I can't say that I know the lexicon as intimately as a lot of people, so I may be unworthy of being called a Trekkie. That would be doing a disservice to the people who really are Trekkies.
Alice Eve
I've been 6'4" since I was 12. Goofy is somewhere in the lexicon.
Jason Segel
One reason why it has become harder to promote the beneficial side of emotions such as anger is that the moral vocabulary of good and bad has been replaced by the self-help lexicon of positive and negative thinking.
Julian Baggini
The wise man is but a clever infant, spelling letters from a hieroglyphical prophetic book, the lexicon of which lies in eternity.
Thomas Carlyle
and a rather controversial one for birth control that had nevertheless quickly become the most often used rune in the lexicon.
Cassandra Clare
The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.
Bob Dylan
European anti-Semites, Zionism believes that European Jews, unlike European Christians, are not Europeans but foreigners who need to leave Europe to its 'real' people and be 'repatriated' to their own state in Palestine. Today's Israeli Jewish supremacists are reviving anti-Semitic ideas of the turn of the century that had accused Jews of seeking to control the world. From the infamous czarist Protocols of the Elders of Zion to genocidal Nazi propaganda, Jews as a 'power-hungry' people was a notion that was part and parcel of the anti-Semitic lexicon. Today's Israeli Jewish supremacists seem to agree with the anti-Semites that, if Jews do not control the world, they at least control America.
Joseph Massad
We in the U.A.E. have no such word as 'impossible'; it does not exist in our lexicon. Such a word is used by the lazy and the weak, who fear challenges and progress.
Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum
But my father, in all his teaching, demanded of me not only the utmost that I could do, but much that I could by no possibility have done. What he was himself willing to undergo for the sake of my instruction, may be judged from the fact, that I went through the whole process of preparing my Greek lessons in the same room and at the same table at which he was writing: and as in those days Greek and English lexicons were not, and I could make no more use of a Greek and Latin lexicon than could be made without having yet begun to learn Latin, I was forced to have recourse to him for the meaning of every word which I did not know. This incessant interruption, he, one of the most impatient of men, submitted to, and wrote under that interruption several volumes of his History and all else that he had to write during those years.
John Stuart Mill
The author whom a lexicon can keep up with is worth nothing. (Randall Jarrell)
Goethe said, "The author whom a lexicon can keep up with is worth nothing”; Somerset Maugham says that the finest compliment he ever received was a letter in which one of his readers said: "I read your novel without having to look up a single word in the dictionary.”.
Randall Jarrell
Goethe said, "The author whom a lexicon can keep up with is worth nothing"; Somerset Maugham says that the finest compliment he ever received was a letter in which one of his readers said: "I read your novel without having to look up a single word in the dictionary." These writers, plainly, lived in different worlds.
Randall Jarrell
Among the various textual notes that appear in academic journals, I still find much to commend in the articles by J. Enoch Powell in the Classical Quarterly for 1935 and 1938. His suggestions and conjectures are also implicit in his absolutely indispensable Lexicon to Herodotus.
Enoch Powell
Henry George Liddell, a high-bred gentleman of lofty character, a man of unusual artistic sympathy and cultivation, certified to all of us as a great scholar by his work on the Lexicon; but too much aloof and temperamentally too reserved and distant to have much influence with the undergraduates, and not a man to put energy into the religious life of the place.
Henry George Liddell