Basic Language

Famous quotes containing the words basic and/or language:

    The basic rule of human nature is that powerful people speak slowly and subservient people quickly—because if they don’t speak fast nobody will listen to them.
    Michael Caine [Maurice Joseph Micklewhite] (b. 1933)

    The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)