language

To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born -- the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to he accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it be-devils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.

A strange thing, words. Once they're said, it's hard to imagine they're untrue.

We can never know more than the mind can assimilate and process, nor can we discuss any aspect of the world for which there is no language.

Never trust the translation or interpretation of something without first trusting its interpreter.

But suppose it was truth double strong, it were no truth to me if I couldna take it in. I daresay there's truth in yon Latin book on your shelves; but it's gibberish and no truth to me, unless I know the meaning o' the words.

From both my families, I've learnt important things.From my family of chance, I learnt what it was like to be alone and unrecognized, to be perceived through the prism of delusion, a lost soul marooned in the belly of bedlam. I learned the beauty and power of language, but also its capacity for subtle perfidy, how it can be used to subvert and distort reality, to sanction cruelty and sugarcoat abuse. I learned that words can be the path to freedom or just another lock on the caged door.And from my family of choice, I learn on a daily basis about love and loyalty, about burdens shared and intimacies treasured, about forgiveness and atonement and joy. I learn about the gift of a difficult childhood and the fact that ''it's never too late to have a happy one.

Of course the activists__ot those whose thinking had become rigid, but those whose approach to revolution was imaginatively anarchic__ad long ago grasped the reality which still eluded the press: we were seeing something important. We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, Ave could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society__ atomization could be reversed. This was not a traditional generational rebellion. At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society__ values. They are children who have moved around a lot, San Jose, Chula Vista, here. They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb.They feed back exactly what is given them. Because they do not believe in words__ords are for __ypeheads,_ Chester Anderson tells them, and a thought which needs words is just one more of those ego trips__heir only proficient vocabulary is in the society__ platitudes. As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one__ self depends upon one__ mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from __ broken home._ They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words.

She'd always been comforted by how many words there were in the English language -- more than a million. With so many words surely anything could be said, everything could be under

I don__ know why__t__ just that__ don__ know__hey__e not kin."__urprising word, I think to myself never used it before. Not of kin__ounds like hillbilly talk__ot of a kind__ame root__indness, too__hey can__ have real kindness toward him, they__e not his kin -- . That__ exactly the feeling. Old word, so ancient it__ almost drowned out. What a change through the centuries. Now anybody can be "kind." And everybody__ supposed to be. Except that long ago it was something you were born into and couldn__ help. Now it__ just a faked-up attitude half the time, like teachers the first day of class. But what do they really know about kindness who are not kin.

Let us dedicate this new era to mothers around the world, and also to the mother of all mothers -- Mother Earth. It is up to us to keep building bridges to bring the world closer together, and not destroy them to divide us further apart. We can pave new roads towards peace simply by understanding other cultures. This can be achieved through traveling, learning other languages, and interacting with others from outside our borders. Only then will one truly discover how we are more alike than different. Never allow language or cultural traditions to come between brothers and sisters. The same way one brother may not like his sister's choice of fashion or hairstyle, he will never hate her for her personal style or music preference. If you judge a man, judge only his heart. And if you should do so, make sure you use the truth in your conscience when weighing one's character. Do not measure anybody strictly based on the bad you see in them and ignore all the good.

If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms _ in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

To really change the world, we have to help people change the way they see things. Global betterment is a mental process, not one that requires huge sums of money or a high level of authority. Change has to be psychological. So if you want to see real change, stay persistent in educating humanity on how similar we all are than different. Don't only strive to be the change you want to see in the world, but also help all those around you see the world through commonalities of the heart so that they would want to change with you. This is how humanity will evolve to become better. This is how you can change the world. The language of the heart is mankind's main common language.

It's only words... unless they're true.

Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.

What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.

Language is something you inherit, it's never just you doing the talking, which helps when you're pretending.

Verily, for nine hundred years have I lost. Everyone I knew is dead, the empire gone, and who knows in what state the world is left. Should what thy sister reports prove true, much hath changed in the w