Malcolm X
Civil Rights Activist, Minister
"If you're not ready to die for it, put the word 'freedom' out of your vocabulary."
Vocabulary quotes
Vocabulary
410 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Judith Butler
Philosopher, Gender Theorist
"We form ourselves within the vocabularies that we did not choose, and sometimes we have to reject those vocabularies, or actively develop new ones."
Wayne Dyer
Author, Motivational Speaker
"Live today. Remove all blame from your vocabulary. Catch yourself when you find yourself using your past history as a reason for your failure to act today, and instead say, 'I am free now to detach myself from what used to be.'"
Sinclair Lewis
Novelist
"Being a man given to oratory and high principles, he enjoyed the sound of his own vocabulary and the warmth of his own virtue."
Jack Gilbert
Poet
"I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can."
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside vocabulary — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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Vocabulary quotes (page 1 of 21)
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"I do think it's important that we experiment with new vocabularies. That new words help us conceptualize our social existence in a different way."
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"All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in substituting diabolical abstractions for human beings. Similarly, those who defend war have invented a pleasant sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder."
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"It's important to read because it's really good for your vocabulary. It's really good for your imagination. I enjoy reading because I find it relaxing."
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"The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary."
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"A language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules. ... Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind."
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"The appearance in nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality, inversion, pederasty, and "psychic hermaphroditism" made possible a strong advance of social controls into this area of "perversity"; but it also made possible the formation of a "reverse" discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or "naturality" be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified."
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"There's no vocabulary For love within a family, love that's lived in But not looked at, love within the light of which All else is seen, the love within which All other love finds speech. This love is silent."
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"If you know how to handle the verbs, you know how to handle the language. Everything else is just vocabulary."
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"All I know is what I have words for."
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"Fear is not a part of my vocabulary, actually, and I think that it's really made me a much smarter, braver for sure, person."
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"Vocabulary enables us to interpret and to express. If you have a limited vocabulary, you will also have a limited vision and a limited future."
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"Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt."
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"We don't have a good language to talk about this kind of thing. In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer... But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation."
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"Vocabulary spills I'm ill."
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"It's okay to send flowers, but don't let the flowers do all the talking. Flowers have a limited vocabulary. About the best flowers can say is that you remembered. But your words tell the rest."
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"English is the largest of human tongues, with several times the vocabulary of the second largest language -- this alone made it inevitable that English would eventually become, as it did, the lingua franca of this planet, for it is thereby the richest and most flexible -- despite its barbaric accretions . . . or, I should say, because of its barbaric accretions. English swallows up anything that comes its way, makes English out of it."
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"It’ll be the ballot or it’ll be the bullet. It’ll be liberty or it’ll be death. And if you’re not ready to pay that price don’t use the word freedom in your vocabulary."
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"Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion."
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"I always had a great appreciation for jazz, but I'm a very pedestrian musician. I get by. I like to think that my main instrument is vocabulary."
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"Thinkers think and doers do. But until the thinkers do and the doers think, progress will be just another word in the already overburdened vocabulary by sense."
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