Inclusive Language Quotes

Language changes. If it does not change, like Latin it dies. But we need to be aware that as our language changes, so does our theology change, particularly if we are trying to manipulate language for a specific purpose. That is what is happening with our attempts at inclusive language, which thus far have been inconclusive and unsuccessful. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

Imagine if you were asked by your country to be an ambassador to an enemy nation. You would probably have to learn a new language and adapt to some customs and cultural differences in order to be polite and accomplish your mission. As an ambassador you would not be able to isolate yourself from the enemy. To fulfill your mission, you would have to have contact and relate to them. ~ Rick Warren

Kindness is the universal language of pure love, so let us express ourselves with kindness. ~ Debasish Mridha

In 1487 alone, two hundred heretics had-in one of the greatest euphemisms in the history of language-"relaxed," that is, burned at the stake.
Dogs of God, Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors ~ James Reston, Jr.

You know the way some Orientals confuse the sounds of R and L when they speak a Western language? That's because R and L in many Eastern languages are allophones, that is, considered the same sound, written and even heard the same - just like the th at the beginning of they and at the beginning of theater." "What's different about the sound of theater and they?" "Say them again and listen. One's voiced and the other's unvoiced, they're as distinct as V and F; only they're allophones - at least in British English; so Britishers are used to hearing them as though they were the same phoneme. ~ Samuel R. Delany

When leaving the ground, our ears were assaulted by language that you wouldn't normally hear on a building site. In fact, most people in construction wouldn't normally swear in public or in front of children. It appeared to me that the men in their twenties using these words were doing so on purpose, perhaps to make themselves appear 'hard' amongst other Millwall supporters, or to intimidate the opposition. But looking at them, they were pigeon chested and weak armed, and I suspected their use of foul language was intended to boost their stature to compensate for their lack of physical strength ~ Karl Wiggins

Silence speaks in vibes, not sentences. So stop repeating yourself to those who continue to dis your warning signals. ~ T.F. Hodge

Even though I now speak the language fairly well, the spoken language doesn't help me. A conversation involves a sort of collaboration and, often, an act of forgiveness. When I speak I can make mistakes, but I'm somehow able to make myself understood. On the page I am alone. The spoken language is a kind of antechamber with respect to the written, which has a stricter, more elusive logic. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

In the most basic way, writers are defined not by the stories they tell, or their politics, or their gender, or their race, but by the words they use. Writing begins with language, and it is in that initial choosing, as one sifts through the wayward lushness of our wonderful mongrel English, that choice of vocabulary and grammar and tone, the selection on the palette, that determines who's sitting at that desk. Language creates the writer's attitude toward the particular story he's decided to tell. ~ Donald E. Westlake

Love is the essence of life,
Love is the universal language of all creation,
Love is the eternal desire,
Love is the life's flower with fragrance to share,
So feel the longing for love and being beloved. ~ Debasish Mridha

I have never said, as is sometimes believed, or even suggested that lower-class children should not learn the so-called educated norm of the Portuguese language of Brazil. What I have said is that the problems of language always involve ideological questions and, along with them, questions of power. ~ Paulo Freire

A child, when it begins to speak, learns what it is that it knows. ~ John Hall Wheelock

As a poet, there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language from corruption. ~ W. H. Auden

The real art is not to come up with extraordinary clever words but to make ordinary simple words do extraordinary things. To use the language that we all use and to make amazing things occur. ~ Graham Swift

Yeats was the greatest poet of our times ... certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language. ~ T. S. Eliot

What a lover of words and their beauty discovers. . .is that there is literally a word for every object, material or immaterial, every relation, and every process that human beings have experienced. Because that is what words are: the crystallization in language of thousands of years of experience across numerous cultures and civilizations, each word being the most tangible flesh in which thought is tabernacled. ~ Charles Johnson

Barthes found the exit to this merry-go-round by reminding himself that "it is language which is assertive, not he." It is absurd, Barthes says, to try to flee from language's assertive nature by "add[ing] to each sentence some little phrase of uncertainty, ~ Maggie Nelson

The hermit keeps a window open onto the sky, without which the world would perish from suffocation, ugliness and boredom. He is the only one, along with the poet, who still speaks the language of the beyond, who makes existence sacred, who gives life this verticality without which humanity is buffeted about beneath itself. He is a rampart against the assaults of mediocrity, nastiness, hatred that is intolerant of its opposite. He is this force, made out of weakness, that warms the atmosphere, melts the winter of the world. For men turned toward secondary things, his presence recalls the existence of the essential things: the order of the world, knowledge, the priority of salvation and the adoration of the Supreme, by imitating the sunflower whose heliotropism has much to teach us, who never turns away from the trisolar brightness. Model and prototype, the hermit represents, in a chaotic and dehumanized world, a final landmark, an ultimate axis for reference. He allows man to remain standing by recalling the Absolute; when deprived of the Totality, man becomes totalitarian by compensation. ~ Jean Biès

This is why tyrants of all stripes, infernal servants, have such deep-seated hatred for the nomads - this is why they persecute the Gypsies and the Jews, and why they force all free peoples to settle, assigning the addresses that serve as our sentences.
What they want is to create a frozen order, to falsify time's passage. They want for the days to repeat themselves, unchanging, they want to build a big machine where every creature will be forced to take its place and carry out false actions. Institutions and offices, stamps,newsletters, a hierarchy, and ranks, degrees, applications and rejections, passports, numbers, cards, elections results, sales and amassing points, collecting, exchanging some things for others.
What they want is to pin down the world with the aid of barcodes, labelling all things, letting it be known that everything is a commodity, that this is how much it will cost you. Let this new foreign language be illegible to humans, let it be read exclusively by automatons, machines. That way by night, in their great underground shops, they can organize reading of their own barcoded poetry.

Move. Get going. Blesses is he who leaves. ~ Olga Tokarczuk

Public speaking is done in the public tongue, the national or tribal language; and the language of our tribe is the men's language. Of course women learn it. We're not dumb. If you can tell Margaret Thatcher from Ronald Reagan, or Indira Gandhi from General Somoza, by anything they say, tell me how. This is a man's world, so it talks a man's language. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

If I did not repeatedly die from the intensity of my love for you,
I would not have learned a single letter from the love language.
I am not like other women,
If I love, I die.
لو لم أمت مراراً من شدة حبي لك
لما تعلمت حرفا واحدأ عن الحب
أنا لسيت كسائر النساء
إذا أحببت أموت ~ Amany Al-Hallaq

Python has been an important part of Google since the beginning, and remains so as the system grows and evolves. Today dozens of Google engineers use Python, and we're looking for more people with skills in this language. ~ Peter Norvig

God did not give us the gospel to convince humanity; the gospel was given to us to master the language of a new world called God's Paradise. John 15:16. ~ Felix Wantang

Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption. ~ Keith Bostic

Heart is a sea, language is the shore. Whatever is in a sea hits the shore. ~ Rumi

It was so important to him, and he made it important to me: poetry, and language, and how we use it to remind ourselves of how our lives should be lived . . . ~ Lois Lowry

I've always been able to say what I meant! It's a writer's job to carve with language, to hew close to the bone, so why can't I saw what it feels like? ~ Stephen King

A great writer is always like a foreigner in the language which he expresses himself, even if this is his native tongue. At the limit, he draws his strength from a mute and unknown minority that belongs only to him. He is a foreigner in his own language: he does not mix another language with his own language, he carves out a nonpreexistent foreign language within his own language. He makes the language itself scream, stutter, stammer, or murmur. ~ Gilles Deleuze

What we are able to say about our intimate relation with a book will have more force if we have not thought about it excessively. Instead, we need only let our unconscious express itself within us and give voice, in this privileged moment of openness in language, to the secret ties that bind us to the book, and therefore to ourselves. ~ Pierre Bayard

Bunny boiler is now part of our language, and I'm proud of that. ~ Glenn Close

[N]o language has ever had a word for a virgin man. ~ Will Durant

Linguistics will have to recognise laws operating universally in language, and in a strictly rational manner, separating general phenomena from those restricted to one branch of languages or another. ~ Ferdinand De Saussure

As children, we come into the world with a natural desire to both speak and draw. Society makes sure that we learn language properly, right from the beginning, but art is treated as a gift of innate genius, something we either have or don't. ~ Charles De Lint

Since Men changed the language that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

As Emerson observes, "The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry."4 ~ Gene Edward Veith Jr.