A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.
~ Gaston Bachelard

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.
~ Marcellinus Ammianus

I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is an language I do not understand.
~ Sir Edward Appleton

All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.
~ Antonin Artaud

All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.
~ Roland Barthes

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.
~ Roland Barthes

If everything is perfect, language is useless. This is true for animals. If animals don't speak, it's because everything's perfect for them. If one day they start to speak, it will be because the world has lost a certain sort of perfection.
~ Jean Baudrillard

Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.
~ Jean Baudrillard

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.
~ Aubrey Beardsley

Drawing on my fine command of the language, I said nothing.
~ Robert Benchley

One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.
~ John Berger

Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.
~ Louise Bogan

The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib.
~ Robert Burchfield

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.
~ Anthony Burgess

Language is a virus from outer space.
~ William S. Burroughs

Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.
~ Italo Calvino

There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.
~ Elias Canetti

It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.
~ Raymond Chandler

To have another language is to possess a second soul.
~ Charlemagne

I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse.
~ Charles V