Home > Topic > vocabularies
1 " I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can. "
― Jack Gilbert , The Great Fires
2 " Have you noticed how vocabularies fluctuate in order to cope with our need to justify ourselves? "
― J.G. Ballard , Millennium People
3 " How many losses does it take to stop a heart,to lay waste to the vocabularies of desire? "
― Dorianne Laux , Smoke
4 " Enriched vocabularies someone had (and used) are produced by a boundless wondrous mind. Sometime with a non mediocre experience also. "
5 " I would expect a significant development and elaboration of language in only a few generations if all the chimps unable to communicate were to die or fail to reproduce. Basic English corresponds to about 1,000 words. Chimpanzees are already accomplished in vocabularies exceeding 10 percent of that number. "
― Carl Sagan , Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence
6 " The wisdom of the East is immortalized in its vocabularies and must be liberated from European language imperialism once and for all. "
― Thorsten J. Pattberg
7 " We like to think of individuals as unique. Yet if this is true of everyone, then we all share the same quality, namely our uniqueness. What we have in common is the fact that we are all uncommon. Everybody is special, which means that nobody is. The truth, however, is that human beings are uncommon only up to a point. There are no qualities that are peculiar to one person alone. Regrettably, there could not be a world in which only one individual was irascible, vindictive or lethally aggressive. This is because human beings are not fundamentally all that different from each other, a truth postmodernists are reluctant to concede. We share an enormous amount in common simply by virtue of being human, and this is revealed by the vocabularies we have for discussing human character. We even share the social processes by which we come to individuate ourselves. "
― Terry Eagleton , How to Read Literature
8 " If these Mount Everests of the financial world are going to labor and bring forth still more pictures with people being blown to bits with bazookas and automatic assault rifles with no gory detail left unexploited, if they are going to encourage anxious, ambitious actors, directors, writers and producers to continue their assault on the English language by reducing the vocabularies of their characters to half a dozen words, with one colorful but overused Anglo-Saxon verb and one unbeautiful Anglo-Saxon noun covering just about every situation, then I would like to suggest that they stop and think about this: making millions is not the whole ball game, fellows. Pride of workmanship is worth more. Artistry is worth more. "
― Gregory Peck
9 " The school-boy doesn't force himself to learn his vocabularies and rules altogether at night, but knows that be must impress them again in the morning. "
