Best 13 quotes of Robert Lane Greene on MyQuotes

Afrikaans was the language of the white minority in South Africa, and the forced learning of it created resentment among blacks. Even so, Nelson Mandela made it a point to learn this language in prison in anticipation that it would help him lead the whole of South Africa.

Americans tend to use "nation" as a synonym for "country." But political scientists and historians, as well as many Europeans, tend to use the term for a much more specific phenomenon: a group of people who feel they belong together, whether they have a country of their own or not.

Arguments about language are usually arguments about politics, disguised and channeled through one of our most distinctive markers of identity.

As economists like to say, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data.

I'd start to explain with the outward sheepish and inner pride of the nerd.

If you look at the historical record, you will find that language has always been in decline. Which means, really, and it never has.

Most people learn their trade – almost always farming – from their parents or village communities. Industrialization changed all that. People had to be able to learn to pick up new skills faster, since the economy had not only to produce but to continually grow and become more sophisticated technologically. Learning one frayed over many years would not do. People needed GENERIC skills, to which only a small amount of extra training would allow them to move around the economy, taking new jobs and responding to innovation.

Standard languages are inventions, most of them confined to a recent period in human history. They are codes that give access not to clear thinking and basic decency but to the structured parts of our lives such as job interviews, political speeches, literary essays, novels, and the like. They signal education and learning, but they are not the same thing as education and learning.

There is really only one way to learn good writing: good reading and extensive writing and revising.

Thousands of miles from Georgia, beginning that night in England, my dad became a foreign-language speaker to me – and I was utterly charmed by it. I found the foreigner in myself.

To most of the general public, language comes down less to wonder than a rather censorious bifurcated sentiment – namely, that the vast majority of the world's humans either speak and something primitive or speak something badly.

Too many people are too angry about language too much of the time. This time could be better spent listening, learning, and enjoying the vast variety of human language around them.

Yesterday's abomination is today's rule.