„Not only the entire ability to think rests on language… but language is also the crux of the misunderstanding of reason with itself.“

Quelle: The Monkey Grammarian (1974), Ch. 4
Ch. 4 -->
Kontext: Fixity is always momentary. But how can it always be so? If it were, it would not be momentary — or would not be fixity. What did I mean by that phrase? I probably had in mind the opposition between motion and motionlessness, an opposition that the adverb always designates as continual and universal: it embraces all of time and applies to every circumstance. My phrase tends to dissolve this opposition and hence represents a sly violation of the principle of identity. I say “sly” because I chose the word momentary as an adjectival qualifier of fixity in order to tone down the violence of the contrast between movement and motionlessness. A little rhetorical trick intended to give an air of plausibility to my violation of the rules of logic. The relations between rhetoric and ethics are disturbing: the ease with which language can be twisted is worrisome, and the fact that our minds accept these perverse games so docilely is no less cause for concern. We ought to subject language to a diet of bread and water if we wish to keep it from being corrupted and from corrupting us. (The trouble is that a-diet-of-bread-and-water is a figurative expression, as is the-corruption-of-language-and-its-contagions.) It is necessary to unweave (another metaphor) even the simplest phrases in order to determine what it is that they contain (more figurative expressions) and what they are made of and how (what is language made of? and most important of all, is it already made, or is it something that is perpetually in the making?). Unweave the verbal fabric: reality will appear. (Two metaphors.) Can reality be the reverse of the fabric, the reverse of metaphor — that which is on the other side of language? (Language has no reverse, no opposite faces, no right or wrong side.) Perhaps reality too is a metaphor (of what and/or of whom?). Perhaps things are not things but words: metaphors, words for other things. With whom and of what do word-things speak? (This page is a sack of word-things.) It may be that, like things which speak to themselves in their language of things, language does not speak of things or of the world: it may speak only of itself and to itself.

On if the poet has a responsibility in “‘The language is constructing our ideas more than we are deploying the language’: An interview with Gregory Pardlo” http://gulfcoastmag.org/reviews-and-interviews/art-and-reviews/an-interview-with-gregory-pardlo/ in Gulf Coast Magazine (2019 Jul 17)

Quelle: Language, thought and reality (1956), p. 252.

Quelle: 7 March 1942, quoted in Hitler's Table Talk, 1941–1944

Quelle: The Character of Physical Law (1965), chapter 2, “The Relation of Mathematics to Physics”
Kontext: Mathematics is not just a language. Mathematics is a language plus reasoning. It's like a language plus logic. Mathematics is a tool for reasoning. It's, in fact, a big collection of the results of some person's careful thought and reasoning. By mathematics, it is possible to connect one statement to another.

Consequences of the Difference p. 85
Addresses to the German Nation (Reden an die deutsche Nation) 1808, Fifth Address

Acceptance speech, Alumni Achievement Award, Collinsville, Illinois. 2017.

"We've got to start over from scratch" - Well, that's almost any academic language you find.
"English phrases" - Well, that's Cobol. You know, cargo cult English. (laughter)
"Text processing doesn't matter much" - Fortran.
"Simple languages produce simple solutions" - C.
"If I wanted it fast, I'd write it in C" - That's almost a direct quote from the original awk page.
"I thought of a way to do it so it must be right" - That's obviously PHP. (laughter and applause)
"You can build anything with NAND gates" - Any language designed by an electrical engineer. (laughter)
"This is a very high level language, who cares about bits?" - The entire scope of fourth generation languages fell into this... problem.
"Users care about elegance" - A lot of languages from Europe tend to fall into this. You know, Eiffel.
"The specification is good enough" - Ada.
"Abstraction equals usability" - Scheme. Things like that.
"The common kernel should be as small as possible" - Forth.
"Let's make this easy for the computer" - Lisp. (laughter)
"Most programs are designed top-down" - Pascal. (laughter)
"Everything is a vector" - APL.
"Everything is an object" - Smalltalk and its children. (whispered:) Ruby. (laughter)
"Everything is a hypothesis" - Prolog. (laughter)
"Everything is a function" - Haskell. (laughter)
"Programmers should never have been given free will" - Obviously, Python. (laughter).
Public Talks, "Present Continuous - Future Perfect"

Relational Database: A Practical Foundation for Productivity (1982)

Quelle: Sing You Home

"Politics and the English Language" (1946)
Quelle: 1984
Kontext: But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.
Kontext: All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find — this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.

[1991, Roots of the Human Condition, World Wisdom, 21, 0-941532-11-9]
Spiritual path, Metaphysics

Quelle: The Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton http://books.google.com/books?id=9_m6AAAAIAAJ&q=%22Half+the+trouble+about+the+modern+man+is+that+he+is+educated+to+understand+foreign+languages+and+misunderstand+foreigners%22&pg=PA322#v=onepage (1936)

Interview with Ed Hirsch (1986), Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series (Penguin, 1988)

Quelle: Virtual Mercury House. Planetary & Interplanetary Events, p. 48

Quelle: 1930s-1951, Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993), Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 133

The Circle of Memory, An Autobiography (2016)