“If you know only one language, you're a prisoner, stuck in the tyranny of that one language.”

“The involuntary poetry of one who is not fluent in the language.”

“Maybe then you comprehend, speaking one language only is a prison!”

“The fact that in the twentieth century a greater proportion of the people in the world could communicate with one another, using English or just a few other languages, appears not to have stopped any wars, nor to have reduced the frequency with which wars have broken out, nor to have made the wars that have broken out less brutal. In fact, several murderous wars have been fought recently among people who speak 'the same language' in real terms.”

“The gospel gives me hope, and hope is not a language the dark voices understand.”

“Teachers were powerful enough to kill the indigenous languages: they are not powerful enough to bring them back to life.”

“While people argue with one another about the specifics of Freud's work and blame him for the prejudices of his time, they overlook the fundamental truth of his writing, his grand humility: that we frequently do not know our own motivations in life and are prisoners to what we cannot understand. We can recognize only a small fragment of our own, and an even smaller fragment of anyone else's, impetus.”