Best 41 quotes of S. I. Hayakawa on MyQuotes

S. I. Hayakawa

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    Advertising is a symbol-manipulating occupation

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    Agreement is brought about by changing people's minds - other people's.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    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.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    Animals struggle with each other for food or for leadership, but they do not, like human beings, struggle with each other for thatthat stands for food or leadership: such things as our paper symbols of wealth (money, bonds, titles), badges of rank to wear on our clothes, or low-number license plates, supposed by some people to stand for social precedence. For animals the relationship in which one thing stands for something else does not appear to exist except in very rudimentary form.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    Bilingualism for the individual is fine, but not for a country.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    Definitions, contrary to popular opinion, tell us nothing about things. They only describe people's linguistic habits; that is, they tell us what noises people make under what conditions.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    English is the key to full participation in the opportunities of American life.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    English, our common language, binds our diverse people.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    Ever since man began to till the soil and learned not to eat the seed grain but to plant it and wait for harvest, the postponement of gratification has been the basis of a higher standard of living and of civilization.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    Few people...have had much training in listening. The training of most oververbalized professional intellectuals is in the opposite direction. Living in a competitive culture, most of us are most of the time chiefly concerned with getting our own views across, and we tend to find other people's speeches a tedious interruption of the flow of our own ideas.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    Good teachers never say anything. What they do is create the conditions under which learning takes place.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    How anybody dresses is indicative of his self-concept. If students are dirty and ragged, it indicates they are not interested in tidying up their intellects either.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    I believe we are being dishonest with language minority groups if we tell them they can take full part in American life without learning the English language.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    If everybody is rewarded just for being alive, you get the same sort of effect as you do when you reward every student just for being enrolled. You destroy not only education, you destroy society by giving A's to everyone. This is a philosophical consideration that bothers me very much as I sit in the United States Senate and see the great budget allocations going through.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    If I spoke no English, my world would be limited to the Japanese-speaking community, and no matter how talented I was, I could never do business, seek employment or take part in public affairs outside that community.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    If you see in any given situation only what everybody else can see, you can be said to be so much a representative of your culture that you are a victim of it.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    I'm going to speak my mind because I have nothing to lose.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    In the case of drama (stage, movies, television ), there appear to be people in almost every audience who never quite fully realize that a play is a set of fictional, symbolic representations. An actor is one who symbolizes other people, real or imagined. [...] Also some years ago it was reported that when Edward G. Robinson, who used to play gangster roles with extraordinary vividness, visited Chicago, local hoodlums would telephone him at his hotel to pay their professional respects.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    It is the individual who knows how little they know about themselves who stands the most reasonable chance of finding out something about themselves before they die.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    Language is a unifying instrument which binds people together. When people speak one language they become as one, they become a society.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    McDonalds in Tokyo is a terrible revenge for Pearl Harbor.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    Notice the difference between what happens when a man says to himself, I have failed three times, and what happens when he says, I am a failure.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    Patriotic societies seem to think that the way to educate school children in a democracy is to stage bigger and better flag-saluting.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    People who think of themselves as tough-minded and realistic, among them influential political leaders and businessmen as well as go-getters and hustlers of smaller caliber, tend to take it for granted that human nature is selfish and that life is a struggle in which only the fittest may survive. According to this philosophy, the basic law by which man must live, in spite of his surface veneer of civilization, is the law of the jungle. The "fittest" are those who can bring to the struggle superior force, superior cunning, and superior ruthlessness.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    Republicans are people who, if you were drowning 50 feet from shore, would throw you a 25-foot rope and tell you to swim the other 25 feet because it would be good for your character. Democrats would throw you a hundred-foot rope and then walk away looking for other good deeds to do.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    The English Language Amendment says above all, 'Let's see to it that our children, our young people, learn English. Let us not deny them the opportunity to participate in American life, so that they can go as far as their dreams and talents can take them.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    The great thing about the United States is our ability to absorb foreign people and make them a part of us.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    The language we share is at the core of our identity as citizens, and our ticket to full participation in American political life. We can speak any language we want at the dinner table, but English is the language of public discourse, or the marketplace and of the voting booth.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    The last thing a scientist would do is cling to a map because he inherited it from his grandfather, or because it was used by George Washington or Abraham Lincoln.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    There is only one thing age can give you, and that is wisdom.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    The traditional educational theory is to the effect that the way to bring up children is to keep them innocent (i.e., believing in biological, political, and socioeconomic fairy tales) as long as possible ... that students should be given the best possible maps of the territories of experience in order that they may be prepared for life, is not as popular as might be assumed.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    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.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    The United States is enriched by many cultures, and united by a single common language.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    Those terrifying verbal jungles called laws are simply such directives, accumulated, codified, and systematized through the centuries.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    We live in a highly competitive society, each of us trying to outdo the other in wealth, in popularity or social prestige, in dress, in scholastic grades or golf scores. One is often tempted to say that conflict, rather than cooperation, is the great governing principle of human life.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    We should keep [the Panama Canal]. After all, we stole it fair and square.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    You guys are both saying the same thing. The only reason you're arguing is because you're using different words.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    You just don't know anything unless you can write it. Sure you can argue things out in your own head and bring them out at parties, but in order to argue anything thoroughly, you must be able to put it down on paper.

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    S. I. Hayakawa

    If our ideas and beliefs are held with an awareness of abstracting, they can be changed if found to be inadequate or erroneous. But if they are held without an awareness of abstracting-if our mental maps are believed to be the territory-they are prejudices. As teachers or parents, we cannot help passing on to the young a certain amount of misinformation and error, however hard we may try not to. But if we teach them to be habitually conscious of the process of abstraction, we give them the means by which to free themselves from whatever erroneous notions we may have inadvertently taught them.