Famous quotes containing the words english language, english, language and/or private:
“The English language may hold a more disagreeable combination of words than “The doctor will see you now.” I am willing to concede something to the phrase “Have you anything to say before the current is turned on?””
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“This seems a long while ago, and yet it happened since Milton wrote his Paradise Lost. But its antiquity is not the less great for that, for we do not regulate our historical time by the English standard, nor did the English by the Roman, nor the Roman by the Greek.... From this September afternoon, and from between these now cultivated shores, those times seemed more remote than the dark ages.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“There is not much less vexation in the government of a private family than in the managing of an entire state.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)