A Quote by William Colby

The habits and language of clandestinity can intoxicate even its own practitioners. — © William Colby
The habits and language of clandestinity can intoxicate even its own practitioners.
People who work in specialized fields seem to have their own language. Practitioners develop a shorthand to communicate among themselves. The jargon can almost sound like a foreign language.
In Italy, you're in your comfort zone when it comes to language, lifestyle, your habits and preparations, and moving abroad is not easy. It's not easy to carry over your own ideas about football, your own methods. You have to get everything across in a different language, and that wastes a lot of energy.
A most important, but also most elusive, aspect of any tool is its influence on the habits of those who train themselves in its use. If the tool is a programming language this influence is, whether we like it or not, an influence on our thinking habits.... A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits.
Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go.
Some feminist critics debate whether we take our meaning and sense of self from language and in that process become phallocentric ourselves, or if there is a use of language that is, or can be, feminine. Some, like myself, think that language is itself neither male nor female; it is creatively expansive enough to be of use to those who have the wit and art to wrest from it their own significance. Even the dread patriarchs have not found a way to 'own' language any more than they have found a way to 'own' earth (though many seem to believe that both are possible).
Under the Assads, Kurds were forbidden from learning their own language at school, or even from speaking it in the military. The result is a generation of Syrian Kurds, many now in late middle age, who can't write their own language.
Under the Assads, Kurds were forbidden from learning their own language at school, or even from speaking it in the military. The result is a generation of Syrian Kurds, many now in late middle age, who cant write their own language.
Even if you're a genius and you invent your own language, it doesn't become a language until there are people using it.
An over-indulgence of anything, even something as pure as water, can intoxicate.
Music is a manifestation of the human spirit, similar to language. Its greatest practitioners have conveyed to mankind things not possible to say in any other language. If we do not want these things to remain dead treasures, we must do our utmost to make the greatest possible number of people understand their idiom.
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.
It was always remarkable to me how ignorant the labels were of the listening habits of their own customers, and how obstinate they were in denying those habits and then trying to essentially alter those habits instead of retooling their business to adapt to them.
The difference between physics and metaphysics is not that the practitioners of one are smarter than the practitioners of the other. The difference is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory.
And habits are hell's own substitute for good intentions. Habits are the ruin of ambition, of initiative , of imagination. They're the curse of marriage and the after-bane of death.
Every grown-up man consists wholly of habits, although he is often unaware of it and even denies having any habits at all.
There is something false in this search for a purely feminine writing style. Language, such as it is, is inherited from a masculine society, and it contains many male prejudices. We must rid language of all that. Still, a language is not something created artificially; the proletariat can't use a different language from the bourgeoisie, even if they use it differently, even if from time to time they invent something, technical words or even a kind of worker's slang, which can be very beautiful and very rich. Women can do that as well, enrich their language, clean it up.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!