Mahmod Abdelaly Quotes & Sayings

Is language actually getting better, shorter, and easier? Nowadays we often hear exactly the opposite. Teenager slang is awful, students no longer learn Latin, our children - not to mention our president - cannot put together a grammatical sentence. The whimsical poet Ogden Nash was at least half serious in his "Laments for a dying language":

Coin brassy words at will, debase the coinage;
We're in an if-you-cannot-lick-them-join age,
A slovenliness-provides-its-own-excuse age,
Where usage overnight condones misusage.
Farewell, farewell to my beloved language,
Once English, now a vile orangutanguage. — Charles Yang

Our Lord Jesus was not above letting folk minister to Him, for he knew how happy it makes one to do aught for another. It's the happiest work in earth. — Elizabeth Gaskell

Nothing is so rare as a collection of really intelligent short stories. — Morley, Christopher

Today is either the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning. Today we are making history. — Eckhard Pfeiffer

The metal of economic theory is in Marx's pages immersed in such a wealth of steaming phrases as to acquire a temperature not naturally its own. — Joseph A. Schumpeter