A Quote by David Abram

We like to assume that language is a purely human property, our exclusive possession, and that everything else is basically mute.

David Abram

Quote Topics

Assume Basically Else Everything Everything Else Exclusive Human Language Like Mute Our Possession Property Purely

Quote Author

David Abram
American - Philosopher
Born: June 24, 1957

This word "LOVE" - discredited, "clicheed" - can be restored and love, the instinct, the impulse to care for somebody in the hope that somebody will care for you - plus our language, the language, a language - is about all we have. With everything else going on, this is what makes us, what keeps us human.

Toni Morrison

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

Derek Walcott

The past is our only real possession in life. It is the one piece of property of which time cannot deprive us; it is our own in a way that nothing else in life is. In a word, we are our past; we do not cling to it, it clings to us.

Grace King

We are at a time in our country's history that inclusive language is better than exclusive language.

Barack Obama

Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.

Italo Calvino

Property is, after all, a social convention, an agreement about someone's exclusive right to use a thing in specified ways. However, we seem to have forgotten this. We seem to think that property belongs to us in some essential way, that it is of us. We seem to think that our property is part of ourselves, and that by owning it we therefore make ourselves more, larger, greater.

Charles Eisenstein

Everything that is true is authentic. When we were born, we did not have knowledge. As soon as we have language, we learn to describe everything through that language and we learn to be like our family, our parents, those at school, etc.

Miguel Angel Ruiz

God [is] not the exclusive property of any one tradition. The divine light [cannot] be confined to a single lamp, belonging to the East or the West, but enlightens all human beings.

Karen Armstrong

When you read Marx (or Jesus) this way, you come to see that real wealth is not material wealth and real poverty is not just the lack of food, shelter, and clothing. Real poverty is the belief that the purpose of life is acquiring wealth and owning things. Real wealth is not the possession of property but the recognition that our deepest need, as human beings, is to keep developing our natural and acquired powers to relate to other human beings.

Grace Lee Boggs

Either our history shall with full mouth Speak freely of our acts, or else our grave, Like Turkish mute, shall have a tongueless mouth, Not worshipped with a waxen epitaph.

William Shakespeare

Anybody who has ever owned a dog who barked when strangers came near its owner's property has experienced the essential continuity between animal territoriality and human property. Our domesticated cousins of the wolf know, instinctively, that property is no mere social convention or game, but a critically important evolved mechanism for the avoidance of violence. (This makes them smarter than a good many human political theorists.)

Eric S. Raymond

Knowledge conquered by labor becomes a possession - a property entirely our own.

Samuel Smiles

Knowledge conquered by labor becomes a possession -a property entirely our own.

Samuel Smiles

It is only when we have renounced our preoccupation with "I," "me," "mine," that we can truly possess the world in which we live. Everything, provided that we regard nothing as property. And not only is everything ours; it is also everybody else's.

Aldous Huxley

Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.