Famous quotes containing the words mother tongue, mother and/or tongue:
“When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs ... I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb’s bleat.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The lightning—it is good for you. Your father was Frankenstein, but your mother was the lightning. She has come down to you again.”
—W. Scott Darling, and Erle C. Kenton. Ygor (Bela Lugosi)
“When a tongue fails to send forth appropriate shafts, there might be a word to act as healer of these.”
—Aeschylus (525–456 B.C.)