A Quote by Glenn Ligon
Language controls how you are perceived by others, and in that sense, it is a prison.
Related Quotes
I was wondering why I was put in prison for working in an African language when I had not been put in prison for working in English. So really, in prison I started thinking more seriously about the relation between language and power.
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
Language matters because whoever controls the words controls the conversation, because whoever controls the conversation controls its outcome, because whoever frames the debate has already won it, because telling the truth has become harder and harder to achieve in an America drowning in Orwellian Newspeak.
For me, being in prison writing in an African language was a way of saying: "Even if you put me in prison, I will keep on writing in the language which made you put me in prison."
How come we never use prison, the failure of prison, as a reason not to give more prison? There's never a moment where we say, 'OK, well, prison hasn't worked, so we're not going to try that again.'
Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.
Lying is the misuse of language. We know that. We need to remember that it works the other way round too. Even with the best intentions, language misused, language used stupidly, carelessly, brutally, language used wrongly, breeds lies, half-truths, confusion. In that sense you can say that grammar is morality. And it is in that sense that I say a writer's first duty is to use language well.
I much prefer STEAM to STEM. The insertion of the A is arts writ large, and when you learn how to think, that means that you actually need to understand how others have thought before you, how have others made sense of the world.
The key to conversation at work is flexibility and understanding how what you say might be perceived by others.
It's a frightening thing to act on your opinions. You've got to find confidence in yourself, not in what others think of you. I'm still trying to separate how I see myself from how I'm perceived. It's not easy, but it's worth it.
What we have to do is make sure there are prison places for those sent to prison by the courts and we will continue to do that regardless of how many people are sent to prison.
Real freedom isn't subject to how others estimate our value; it is in realizing that none are free who find their sense of worth wondering how others measure their lives.
How good something is should never be determined by its cost, designer, origin, or its perceived value by others.
Language designers want to design the perfect language. They want to be able to say, 'My language is perfect. It can do everything.' But it's just plain impossible to design a perfect language, because there are two ways to look at a language. One way is by looking at what can be done with that language. The other is by looking at how we feel using that language-how we feel while programming.
Rhetoric, which is the use of language to inform or persuade, is very important in shaping public opinion. We are very easily fooled by language and how it is used by others.
Whoever controls the image and information of the past determines what and how future generations will think; whoever controls the information and images of the present determines how those same people will view the past." "He who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past.
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