A Quote by Masha Gessen
Both Trump and Putin use language primarily to communicate not facts or opinions but power: it's not what the words mean that matters but who says them and when. This makes it impossible to negotiate with them and very difficult for journalists to cover them.
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Bend words. Stretch them, squash them, mash them up, fold them. Turn them over or swing them upside down. Make up new words. Leave a place for the strange and downright impossible ones. Use ancient words. Hold on to the gangly, silly, slippy, truthful, dangerous, out-of-fashion ones.
Both Socrates and Jesus were outstanding teachers; both of them urged and practiced great simplicity of life; both were regarded as traitors to the religion of their community; neither of them wrote anything; both of them were executed; and both have become the subject of traditions that are difficult or impossible to harmonize.
There's a guy on YouTube ... who just re-voices Donald Trump. He does a thing called Sassy Trump which is just to take Donald Trump's words and revoice them. Doesn't change them ...and strangely enough it just makes you listen to what Trump is saying. I think the biggest answer to comedy against Trump is Trump's own words.
Words are real. Even if you can't see them, or hold them. Once you send them out in the world, they have power. Never speak words you don't mean.
Language exists to communicate whatever it can communicate. Some things it communicates so badly that we never attempt to communicate them by words if any other medium is available.
Yes and no are very powerful words. Mean them when you say them. Respect them when you hear them.
Words are both better and worse than thoughts, they express them, and add to them; they give them power for good or evil; they start them on an endless flight, for instruction and comfort and blessing, or for injury and sorrow and ruin.
To communicate, put your words in order; give them a purpose; use them to persuade, to instruct, to discover, to seduce.
The Gospel writers are not really interested primarily in the facts of the birth but in the significance, the meaning for them of that birth just as the people who love us are not really interested primarily in the facts of our births but in what it meant to them when we were born and how for them the world was never the same again, how their whole lives were changed with new significance.
Putin has made life difficult for a lot of Russia's richest men; they don't like the sanctions; they don't like the war with the West. Many of them have houses and families and businesses in the West, and so I can see them being unhappy. But at the moment, the political system is so constructed that it would be very difficult for them to leave. That's not saying it couldn't change.
In your relationship with God there are also times when you want to say things and you're trying to find the words to express them. In a human relationship sometimes you struggle for words and you've got to do it, but in a relationship with God he can actually give you a language which enables you to communicate. In a relationship with God you feel things and you want to express them and you're not limited by human language. You can express what you really feel in your heart, through a language that he gives you, and that helps you to communicate with God.
We're trying to be very careful and precise in our use of language, because I think the language we use and the images we project really do have resonance. It's the reason why I don't use the term jihadist to refer to terrorists. It gives them the religious legitimacy they so desperately seek, but I ain't gonna give it to them.
Trump says things others so desperately want to say to people that work, to people wherever they encounter them. Trump says it. Trump carries a banner of this stuff for people. He says and acts in ways that they do in private, but can't get away with in public. But Trump is. It makes him a hero to these people.
For we let our young men and women go out unarmed in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.
And I think both the left and the right should celebrate people who have different opinions, and disagree with them, and argue with them, and differ with them, but don't just try to shut them up.
To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.
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