“The normal man of intelligence has something of a contempt for linguistic studies, convinced as he is nothing can well be more useless. Edward Sapir - 1924”

“There is nothing contemptible about an intoxicated man (if it is nothing more than a bookful of words or a roomful of notes that he has got drunk on). ”

“The marvelous thing is that even in studying linguistics, we find that the universe as a whole is patterned, ordered, and to some degree intelligible to us.”

“I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.”

“The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshiped anything but himself.”

“The difference between a simpleton and an intelligent man, according to the man who is convinced that he is of the latter category, is that the former wholeheartedly accepts all things that he sees and hears while the latter never admits anything except after a most searching scrutiny. He imagines his intelligence to be a sieve of closely woven mesh through which nothing but the finest can pass. ”