Over half of the people in the EU can speak at least two languages with 38% being able to speak English as their second language, but not so in the UK and Ireland; there, 60% of the Brits and Irish are not able to converse in any other language than English.
Americans are even worse, only one-quarter being able to hold a conversation with somebody who doesn’t speak English.
Language is the blood of the soul
into which thoughts run
and out of which they grow.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
To handle a language skilfully
is to practice
a kind of evocative sorcery.
Charles Baudelaire
as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator)
The spirit of a language
is most clearly expressed
in its untranslatable words.
Baroness Marie ‘Freifrau’ von Ebner-Eschenbach
noted for her excellent psychological novels)
Think like a wise man
but communicate
in the language of the people.
William Butler Yeats
The word “good” has many meanings.
For example, if a man
were to shoot his grandmother
at a range of five hundred yards,
I should call him a good shot,
but not necessarily a good man.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton,
better known as G. K. Chesterton
dramatist, journalist, orator, lay theologian,
biographer, and literary and art critic)
Language is wine upon the lips.
Virginia Woolf
foremost modernists of the twentieth century)
The limits of my language
mean the limits of my world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics,
the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of lexis)
Who wants to have an effect on others,
must first speak in their language with them.
Kurt Tucholsky
Languages are not strangers to one another.
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin
cultural critic and essayist)
But if thought corrupts language,
language can also corrupt thought.
Eric Arthur Blair,
better known by his pen name George Orwell
His work is marked by lucid prose, awareness of social injustice,
opposition to totalitarianism, and outspoken support of democratic socialism)
