In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.

 ––Mark Twain

The American arrives in Paris with a few French phrases he has culled from a conversational guide or picked up from a friend who owns a beret.

––Fred Allen

If you would be pungent, be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams –– the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.

––Robert Southey

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

––Thomas Jefferson

One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can’t utter.

––James Earl Jones

One of the difficulties in the language is that all our words from loose using have lost their edge.

 –Ernest Hemingway

If names are not correct, language will not be in accordance with the truth of things.

 ––Confucius

The purpose of Newspeak… is to make all other modes of thought impossible.

 ––George Orwell

A word is dead / When it is said, / Some say. / I say it just / Begins to live / That day.

––Emily Dickinson

You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. Yet in their hearts there is unspoken –– unspeakable –– fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts! Words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home, all the more powerful because they are forbidden. These terrify them. A little mouse –– a little tiny mouse! –– of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic.

––Winston Churchill