

Common Language Quotes


"The language of the heart is mankind's main common language." - Suzy Kassem

"Two nations divided by a common language." - Winston Churchill

"For me, myth is the 'common' language of us all." - Janet Morris

"Nature is the common, universal language, understood by all." - Kathleen Raine

"English, our common language, binds our diverse people." - S I Hayakawa

"They had nothing in common but the English language." - E M Forster

"Our common language is English. And our common task is to ensure that our non-English-speaking children learn this common language." - William Bennett

"Art as the future there will only be art. This common language will carry the message of love." - Theo van Doesburg

"My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin." - Karl Kraus

"We should constantly use the most common, little, easy words which our language affords." - John Wesley

"A common language is the most obvious binding element in any society." - Michael Howard

"We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language." - Oscar Wilde

"No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language." - Adrienne Rich

"The United States is enriched by many cultures, and united by a single common language." - S I Hayakawa


"The true nature of poetry. The drive to connect. The dream of a common language." - Adrienne Rich

"A common language is a first step towards communication across cultural boundaries." - Ethan Zuckerman

"The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so." - Gore Vidal

"You don't have to have a language in common with someone for a sexual rapport. But it helps if the language you don't understand is Italian." - Madonna Ciccone

"There are very few places in the world where you have to learn a language with no language in common. It's called a monolingual field situation." - Daniel Everett

"Even if it's just a little thing, something like a song, there's still that sort of common language, that common denominator that we can all relate to." - Jonas Carpignano

"In mathematical analysis we call x the undetermined part of line a: the rest we don't call y, as we do in common life, but a-x. Hence mathematical language has great advantages over the common language." - Georg C Lichtenberg

"I have a pretty major problem with a language where one of the most common variables has the name $_" - Brian H. Hook

"We all live in a small unique world, that's why we need at least one sole common language." - William C. Brown

"I have spent many years trying to recover a common language, one that can cross the distance between people." - Robert Bly

"Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries." - Jimmy Carter


"America is not a nation of separation. All our citizens are Americans. The common denominator is our language. Our language is English. The glue that binds generation after generation is both our Constitution and our English language." - James Traficant

"We are all American. If we believe that we are Americans, if we believe that what binds us together is what we have in common, then it must include the common language, and that common tongue is English." - Ernest Istook

"Music is a plane of wisdom, because music is a universal language, it is a language of honor, it is a noble precept, a gift of the Airy Kingdom, music is air, a universal existence common to all the living." - Sun Ra

"That's one of the ways language evolved, by some very obscure form becoming common usage. And I must say that I'm very intrigued by use of language and slang, and criminal underground terms." - Ricky Jay

"The general mental qualification necessary for scientific advancement is that which is usually denominated "common sense," though added to this, imagination, induction, and trained logic, either of common language or of mathematics, are important adjuncts." - Joseph Henry

"There are three things without which there is no country-common language, common judicature, and co-tillage land-for without these a country cannot support itself in peace and social union." - Thomas Davis





"Classical music is a special taste like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand." - Allan Bloom

"One barrier... is the impoverishment of classroom language, the failure to cultivate a common vocabulary about inquiry, explanation, argument and problem solving." - David Perkins

"The language of music is common to all generations and nations; it is understood by everybody, since it is understood with the heart." - Gioachino Rossini

"The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane." - Stephen Fry

"By emphasizing the importance of a common language, we safeguard a proud legacy and help to ensure that America's future will be as great as her past." - Ronald Reagan

"We must pass through the barriers of language and race, of geography and religion, of custom and tradition and we must build on a common foundation." - Vincent Massey

"As there was no form of government common to the peoples thus segregated, nor tie of language, history, habit, or belief, they were called a Republic." - Evelyn Waugh

"Classical music is now a special taste, like the Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand." - Allan Bloom

"The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms." - James Fenimore Cooper

"It's freeing, to think that there's always an aspect of us outside the grasp of speech, the common stuff of language." - Mark Doty

"We understand ... that what constitutes the dignity of a craft is that it creates a fellowship, that it binds men together and fashions for them a common language." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery



"Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator." - George Santayana


"Common sense ain't common." - Will Rogers

"The United States, a land of immigrants from every corner of the world, has been strengthened and unified because its newcomers have historically chosen ultimately to forgo their native language for the English language. We have all benefited from the sharing of ideas, of cultures and beliefs, made possible by a common language. We have all enriched each other." - S I Hayakawa


"Language cares." - Howard Nemerov

"If we lived in a democratic state our language would have to hurtle, fly, curse, and sing, in all the common American names, all the undeniable and representative and participating voices of everybody here." - June Jordan

"Faction is the greatest evil and the most common danger. "Faction" is the conventional English translation of the Greek stasis, one of the most remarkable words to be found in any language." - Moses Finley

"In scientific matters there was a common language and one standard of values; in moral and political problems there were many. ... Furthermore, in science there is a court of last resort, experiment, which is unavailable in human affairs." - Emilio G. Segre


"Your life does' happen in any kind of order. Events do' have cause and effect relationships the way you wish they did. It's all a series of fragments and repetitions and pattern formations. Language and water have this in common." - Lidia Yuknavitch

"Drizzt had always suspected it, but now it was confirmed, that "welcome" was his favortie word in the Common Tongue, and a word, he understood with no equivalent in the language of the drow." - R A Salvatore

"We are a spectacular, splendid manifestation of life. We have language. . . . We have affection. We have genes for usefulness, and usefulness is about as close to a 'common goal' of nature as I can guess at." - Lewis Thomas

"Language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise - that which is common to you, me, and everybody." - T. E. Hulme

"Common sense doesn't have the last word in ethics or anywhere else, but it has, as J. L. Austin said about ordinary language, the first word: it should be examined before it is discarded." - Thomas Nagel


"French was the only language we had in common, and even that was like a dialect we had picked up at a rummage sale, rusty and missing a lot of essential parts." - Patricia Hampl

"God created music as a common language for all men. It inspires the poets, the composers and the architects. It lures us to search our souls for the meaning of the mysteries described in ancient books." - Khalil Gibran

"Cynicism is our shared common language, the Esperanto that actually caught on, and though I'm not fluent in it - I like too many things, and I'm not envious of enough people - I know enough to get by." - Nick Hornby


"We should assume that we all have a lot in common. Speak as if our views are the only sensible ones. This resonates with ordinary people, as long as we speak ordinary language and don't come across as elitists." - Michael Yates

""The Dream of a Common Language" by Adrienne Rich. I carried it the entire hike. On my first night, when I felt like I was in too deep, I read the first poem out loud to myself over and over." - Cheryl Strayed

"In the last 100 years since the invention of sound reproduction, music has really taken off and it is much more a common language because of records and transportation." - Jerry Garcia

"I do feel like the hardest thing is to do something simple and tap into whatever remains of our common language rather than cultivating your own willfully esoteric vocabulary." - David Longstreth

"I am out here in the far West, in San Francisco, in a small room on Carl Street, writing a letter to common people, telling them in simple language what they already know." - William Saroyan


"Faction is the greatest evil and the most common danger. Faction is the conventional English translation of the Greek stasis, one of the most remarkable words to be found in any language." - Moses I. Finley


"We are a spectacular, splendid manifestation of life. We have language.... We have affection. We have genes for usefulness, and usefulness is about as close to a common goal of nature as I can guess at." - Lewis Thomas





"Football fans share a universal language that cuts across many cultures and many personality types. A serious football fan is never alone. We are legion, and football is often the only thing we have in common." - Hunter S Thompson


"Common law is common right." - Edward Coke


"I believe it is our values and our ideals that ultimately bind us together as a nation. But it is the English language which serves as the means by which we can communicate these values to those around us. Our common language, English, is that which unites us." - Asa Hutchinson

"All my life I have done nothing but feel and cultivate my feelings; all their lives they had done nothing but strive for petty goals, the trivial material prizes of American life. We shared a common tongue, but my language was a different language from theirs." - Richard Wright


"I hope and believe my co-religionists understand and admit that I disclaim their theology in toto, and that by no twisting of language or darkening of its meanings can I be made to have any thing whatever in common with them about religious matters... they must take my word for it that there is nothing in common between their theology and my philosophy." - Harriet Martineau

"America is an open society, more open than any other in the world. People of every race, of every color, of every culture are welcomed here to create a new life for themselves and their families. And what do these people who enter into the American mainstream have in common? English, our shared common language." - S I Hayakawa


"I can't say that there's a common practice that has to do with pitch language or with the way pieces are put together because today, anything is fair game. As far as I'm concerned, my own common practice is a piece that engages the attention of listeners from beginning to end, and doesn't rely on or expect the listener to zone out." - Paul Lansky



"Music is a language, a universal language." - Sun Ra

"Common sense is not always common practice." - Stephen Covey

"Common sense is not too common." - Tony Robbins

"Common sense needs to be more common." - Phil Mcgraw

"Common sense is not so common." - Voltaire

"What is common sense isn't common practice." - Stephen Covey


"It is often asserted that discussion is only possible between people who have a common language and accept common basic assumptions. I think that this is a mistake. All that is needed is a readiness to learn from one's partner in the discussion, which includes a genuine wish to understand what he intends to say. If this readiness is there, the discussion wrighteous stupidityill be the more fruitful the more the partner's backgrounds differ." - Karl Popper


"Fashion is instant language." - Miuccia Prada

"All language is political ..." - Robin Lakoff

"Verbing weirds language." - Bill Watterson

"Mathematics is a language" - J. Willard Gibbs

"language is never neutral" - Paulo Freire

"Language disguises thought." - Ludwig Wittgenstein

"Language changes very fast." - John M. Smith

"BASIC - A programming language." - Anonymous

"Music is a language." - Youssou Ndour

"...language is never innocent." - Roland Barthes

"Language is fossil Poetry." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I love body language." - Anton Corbijn


"But the more these conscious illusions of the ruling class are shown to be false and the less they satisfy common sense, the more dogmatically they are asserted and the more deceitful, moralizing and spiritual becomes the language of established society." - Karl Marx

"All fear of 'offensive' speech is bourgeois and reactionary. Historically, profane or bawdy language was common in both the upper and the lower classes, who lived together in rural areas amid the untidy facts of nature. Notions of propriety and decorum come to the fore in urbanized periods ruled by an expanding middle class, which is obsessed with cleanliness, respectability, and conformism." - Camille Paglia


"We feel certain that the extraterrestrial message is a mathematical code of some kind. Probably a number code. Mathematics is the one language we might conceivably have in common with other forms of intelligent life in the universe. As I understand it, there is no reality more independent of our perception and more true to itself than mathematical reality." - Don Delillo

"What makes international cinema so interesting is that each territory has its own sensibility. When you look at an Indian or French film, there's a certain flavor. And even though the language is different, if the film is successful, it has something very common and understandable." - Wong Kar-wai

"The whole compass of the language is tried to find sinonimies [synonyms] and circumlocutions for massacres and murder. Things never called by their common names. Massacre is sometimes called agitation, sometimes effervescence, sometimes excess sometimes too continued an exercise of revolutionary power." - Edmund Burke

"Good marriages are built upon a combination of emotional love and a common commitment to a core of beliefs about what is important in life and what we wish to do with our lives. Speaking each other's primary love language creates the emotional climate where these beliefs can be fleshed out in daily life." - Gary Chapman

"He dreamed of amassing musicians from all over the world in Woodstock and they would sit in a field in a circle and play and play. It didn't matter what key or tempo or what melody, they would keep on playing through their discordance until they found a common language." - Patti Smith

"I do think students in public school (and private) should be required to study the Bible. As a matter of pure education, it's shocking that we [the americans] are not compelled to learn the book, which is the source of our language, our common stories, our political structure, our conflicts." - David Plotz

"The common fluency of speech in many men, and most women, is owing to a scarcity of matter and a scarcity of words; for whosoever is a master of language, and hath a mind full of ideas, will be apt, in speaking, to hesitate upon the choice of both." - Jonathan Swift

"Why has America's fringe left been making common cause with the Taliban, whose views on such matters as women's rights and separation of church and state are appallingly retrograde by anyone's standards? One reason may be that the Taliban seem to have mastered the language of victimhood, sounding like denizens of some college ethnic-studies department." - James Taranto


"There was a time when we were told . . . that a sense of common interest would preside over the conduct of the respective members...This language at the present day would appear as wild as that great part of what we now hear from the same quarter will be thought, when we shall have received further lessons from that best oracle of wisdom, experience." - Alexander Hamilton

"It is clear from a common sense viewing of the program that coarse language is a part of the culture of the individuals being portrayed. To accurately reflect their viewpoint and emotions about blues music requires airing of certain material that, if prohibited, would undercut the ability of the filmmaker to convey the reality of the subject of the documentary." - Jonathan Adelstein




"When I was growing up, everyone around me was fond of fooling around with words. It was certainly common in my family, but I think it is typical of Bombay, and maybe of India, that there is a sense of play in the way people use language." - Salman Rushdie

"The alternative to intellectual property is straightforward: intellectual products should not be owned, as in the case of everyday language. That means not owned by individuals, corporations, governments, or the community as common property. It means that ideas are available to be used by anyone who wants to." - Brian Martin


"The doctrine (of) maintaining that the language of daily life, with words used in their ordinary meanings, suffices for philosophy . . . I find myself totally unable to accept . . . . Because it makes almost inevitable the perpetuation amongst philosophers of the muddle-headedness they have taken over from common sense." - Bertrand Russell

"Though representatives of many ethnic groups came together in the United States, English became their common language. Apparently, this was a natural choice. One can imagine what would have happened if members of each nation moving to the U.S. had spoken only their own tongues and refused to learn English." - Mikhail Gorbachev


"Language and emotions are too easily misread. For example, laughing can mean many things: laughing with you or at you. Does that laugh reflect joy, anger, or that s/he's about to fire you? Too many jobs require complex feelings, pattern recognition, common sense, and the human touch." - Michio Kaku


"Think about Elizabethan English, where the entire English language behaved pretty much like molten lava, like a volcano in mid-eruption. Modern Hebrew has some things in common with Elizabethan English. It is being reshaped and it's expanding very rapidly in various directions." - Amos Oz





"I am intrigued with the shapes people choose as their symbols to create a language. There is within all forms a basic structure, an indication of the entire object with a minimum of lines that becomes a symbol. This is common to all languages, all people, all times." - Keith Haring




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