A Quote by Toni Morrison

A dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences.

Toni Morrison

Quote Topics

Actively Admire Another Baffling Cannot Censored Censoring Conscience Content Dead Desire Dominance Duties Effect Exclusivity Fill Form Free However Human Human Potential Ideas Intellect Interrogation Language Like Longer Maintaining Narcissism Narcotic New New Idea New Ideas No Desire Only Other Own Paralysis Policing Potential Purpose Range Ruthless Shape Spoken Story Tell Than Thoughts Tolerate Unyielding Without Written

Quote Author

Toni Morrison
American - Novelist
February 18, 1931 - August 5, 2019

The earliest language was body language and, since this language is the language of questions, if we limit the questions, and if we only pay attention to or place values on spoken or written language, then we are ruling out a large area of human language.

Paulo Freire

Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not, permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.

Toni Morrison

We sift reality through screens composed of ideas . (And such ideas have their roots in older ideas.) Such idea systems are necessarily limited by language , by the ways we can describe them. That is to say: language cuts the grooves in which our thoughts move. If we seek new validity forms (other laws and other orders) we must step outside language.

Frank Herbert

Language and written language are the only real way we have to see inside another person's thoughts and to know what makes another person human. Without writing, we just wouldn't have that kind of access.

Carol Windley

Literature is a form of language that breaks with the whole definition of genres as forms adapted to an order of representations, and becomes merely a manifestation of a language which has no other law than that of affirming in opposition to all other forms of discourse its own precipitous existence.

Michel Foucault

They (Americans) have their national game, baseball - which is cricket played with a strong American accent - and they have a national language, entirely their own, unlike any other language spoken on the earth.

George Mikes

I sing only in Meronian - my own language - but there are also elements of English and Finnish languages in our songs. When we use the spiritual Meronian language, the word 'international' doesn't do justice to our band. This kind of psychic language's means of communication can reach galaxies beyond our planet, not to mention the other living and inanimate entities of our own planet.

Jussi Lehtisalo

Every language having a structure, by the very nature of language, reflects in its own structure that of the world as assumed by those who evolved the language. In other words, we read unconsciously into the world the structure of the language we use.

Alfred Korzybski

Nature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new word; but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant and universal sense. I wish to learn this language - not that I may know a new grammar, but that I may read the great book which is written in that tongue.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

... while infants will sync with the human voice regardless of language, they later become habituated to the rhythms of their own language and culture ... ... humans are tied to each other by hierarchies of rhythms that are culture-specific and expressed through language and body movement.

Edward T. Hall

The purpose of language is to communicate. That's the most basic definition of language. I have my own subjective experience going on in my head, and you have your own subjective experience going on in your head. The only way we can bridge that unbridgeable gap is through language.

Michael J. Knowles

I don't hate language. I have my own language, but I also enjoy the English language. Obviously, you don't read a lot of literature and not care about language.

Twyla Tharp

Graphic design is a visual language uniting harmony and balance, color and light, scale and tension, form and content. But it is also an idiomatic language, a language of cues and puns and symbols and allusions, of cultural references and perceptual inferences that challenge both the intellect and the eye.

Jessica Helfand

One way to think about what psychedelics are is as catalysts for language development. They literally force the evolution of language. You cannot evolve faster than your language because the language defines the culture of meaning. So if there's a way to accelerate the evolution of language then this is real consciousness expansion and it's a permanent thing. The great legacies of the 60's are in attitudes and language. It boils down to doing your own thing, feeling the vibe, ego-trip, blowing your mind.

Terence McKenna

In animation, what's wonderful is that when you start to work with multiple nationalities, the common language becomes a visual language rather than a spoken language, which blends beautifully with the art form.