Powerful Language Quotes & Sayings

The merging of characteristics between different species creates a very powerful language, one that I love to explore through my art, enabling me to tap into the unconscious. — Virginia Lee

. And it especially cannot endure when powerful groups in that society seek at every turn to undermine and destroy its very being. The threats to democracy are not always from enemies abroad. They can come from those within who espouse the language of democracy and use the liberties afforded them by democratic institutions to undermine the substance of democracy. Weimar cautions us to be wary of those people as well. What comes next can be very bad, even worse than imaginable. — Eric D. Weitz

God wants a companionship with you, as well. He wants to cultivate an intimate relationship with you, and He longs for you to join Him. He pursues you as a gentlemen pursues a woman. He impresses you with creation, magnificent sunsets, brilliant flowers, and powerful seas. He woos you with poetic language, sweet aromas, and courts you with His Holy Spirit. Be still, look around you , see how the Lord is pursuing you! — Jennifer Smith

The four most powerful words in the English language - please, thanks, sorry and why. — Wendy Alexander

The most powerful programming language is Lisp. If you don't know Lisp (or its variant, Scheme), you don't appreciate what a powerful language is. Once you learn Lisp you will see what is missing in most other languages. — Richard Stallman

Language is a powerful thing, and it changes the way we view ourselves, and other people, in delightful and horrifying ways. Anyone with any knowledge of the military, or who pays attention to how the media talks about war, has likely caught on to this.
We don't kill "people." We kill "targets." (Or japs or gooks or ragheads). We don't kill "fifteen year old boys" but "enemy combatants" (yes, every boy 15 and over killed in drone strikes now is automatically listed as an enemy combatant. Not a boy. Not a child.). — Kameron Hurley

A new, a vast, and a powerful language is developed for the future use of analysis, in which to wield its truths so that these may become of more speedy and accurate practical application for the purposes of mankind than the means hitherto in our possession have rendered possible. — Ada Lovelace

These four qualities are among the most beautiful and powerful states of consciousness we can experience. Together they are called in Pali, the language spoken by the Buddha, the brahma-viharas. Brahma means "heavenly." Vihara means "abode" or "home." By practicing these meditations, we establish love (Pali, metta), compassion (karuna), sympathetic joy (mudita), and equanimity (upekkha) as our home. — Sharon Salzberg

Language is very powerful. Language does not just describe reality. Language creates the reality it describes. — Desmond Tutu

The kinds of things that poetry can offer are timeless - mainly the kind of compression it offers of powerful language, powerful feelings and images, and, you know, the inner experience becoming outer. — Brenda Hillman

I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful. — A.S. Byatt

I have been giving the best of my advice to this project since 1975. At first I was extremely hopeful. The original objectives of the language included reliability, readability of programs, formality of language definition, and even simplicity. Gradually these objectives have been sacrificed in favor of power, supposedly achieved by a plethora of features and notational conventions, many of them unnecessary and some of them, like exception handling, even dangerous ...
It is not too late! I believe that by careful pruning of the ADA language, it is still possible to select a very powerful subset that would be reliable and efficient in implementation and safe and economic in use. The sponsors of the language have declared unequivocally, however, that there shall be no subsets. This is the strangest paradox of the whole strange project. If you want a language with no subsets, you must make it small. — C.A.R. Hoare

I'm very sensitive to the English language. I studied the dictionary obsessively when I was a kid and collect old dictionaries. Words, I think, are very powerful and they convey an intention. — Drew Barrymore

An astonishing book. In compelling language, both homely and elegant, Young Men and Fire miraculously combines a fascinating primer on fires and firefighting, a powerful, breathtakingly real reconstruction of a tragedy, and a meditation on writing, grief and human character ... Maclean's last book will stir your heart and haunt your memory. — Timothy Foote

Words are the wellspring of the world, and language is the most powerful weapon in the ancient and still unfolding war between truth and lies. — Dean Koontz

In days of doubt, in days of dreary musings on my country's fate, you alone are my comfort and support, oh great, powerful, righteous, and free Russian language! — Ivan Turgenev

We have to remain humble about our understanding of the brain, because even our most powerful tools remain pretty blunt instruments for decoding the brain. In fact, we still do not know how to decipher the basic language of how the brain works. — Thomas R. Insel

I often surprise people with the simple fact that your cell phone today has more computer power than all of NASA when it put two men on the moon in 1969. Computers are now powerful enough to record the electrical signals emanating from the brain and partially decode them into a familiar digital language. This makes it possible for the brain to directly interface with computers to control any object around it. The fast-growing field is called BMI (brain-machine interface), and the key technology is the computer. — Michio Kaku

It must be powerful language if you canna make oout what the heel it's goin' on aboot! — Terry Pratchett

Just remember, the language of gesture is more effective than the spoken word. Body language is very powerful. Bring the balance within you and project that balance. — Harbhajan Singh Yogi

Words are some of the most powerful and important things I know ... Language is the tool of love and the weapon of hatred. It's the bright red warning flag of danger
and the stone foundation of diplomacy and peace. — Ani DiFranco

Every sentence has its drumbeat. rhythm is one of the most powerful dimensions of language: it separates tribes, united families, soothes children, and shocks us into new awarenesses. Every good writer, marching to his or her own drumbeat, marks out a vibrational field as home territory. The cadences of our sentences carry echos of ancestry and influence as surely as the double helix that orchstrates the life of the body. — Marilyn Chandler McEntyre

That was great, al' that reading' ye did!' said Rob Anybody. 'I didnae understand a single word o' it!' 'Aye, it must be powerful language if you cannae make oout what the heel it's goin' on aboot!' said another pictsie. — Terry Pratchett

Hungarian Language - savage it may be but of a beauty that has nothing human about it, with sonorities of another universe, powerful and corrosive, appropriate to prayer, to groans and to tears, risen out of hell to perpetuate its accent and its aura ... words of nectar and cyanide. — Emile M. Cioran

In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the
culture. — Adrienne Rich

Slowly, I began to relearn something I'd once grasped but had lost sight of: that emotion - that central element of fiction - derives not from information or from explanation, nor from a logical arrangement of the facts, but specifically from powerful images and from the qualities of language: diction, rhythm, form, structure, association, metaphor. And sometimes I also had glimmers of another thing I'd once known: how effectively information can be used to wall off emotion. — Andrea Barrett

From the earliest moments of life, children begin to learn the fundamentals of language. The most powerful influence for effective language development are the verbal interactions with caregivers. — David Perlmutter

... Language shows a tendency for the words "good" and "stupid" to come [close] together... a hint of contempt... within these term[s]... [dictating that] the good man must always be unthreatening. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Because, underneath all of this is the real truth we have been avoiding: climate change isn't an "issue" to add to the list of things to worry about, next to health care and taxes. It is a civilizational wake-up call. A powerful message - spoken in the language of fires, floods, droughts, and extinctions - telling us that we need an entirely new economic model and a new way of sharing this planet. Telling us that we need to evolve. — Naomi Klein

Each child with special needs such as this does not come into the world in order to make our lives difficult and make us suffer. They each come into this world for a reason and have their secret inner voice. It remains to us to offer our love; to 'bear one another's burdens'; to experience a collective humbling - to realize, that is, that we are not as powerful and important as we think; and to try to lighten that person's burden and understand their language. These children are better at speaking the language of God. — Metropolitan Nikolaos Of Mesogaia

What is love at first sight but a proof of the powerful but silent language of physiognomy? — Mary C. Ames

The powerful notion of entropy, which comes from a very special branch of physics ... is certainly useful in the study of communication and quite helpful when applied in the theory of language. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

While all living things affect the evolution of other living things simply by virtue of trying to stay alive, humans interact with the biological evolution of other species in a much more complex and powerful fashion because of one ability: language. Nothing occurs on the human scale without language. No language means no agriculture, no animal farming, no science. — Christine Kenneally

But this discourse, expressed in our paternal language, keeps clear the meaning of its words. The very quality of speech and of the Egyptian words have in themselves the energy of the object they speak of.

Therefore, my king, in so far as you have the power (who are all powerful), keep the discourse uninterpreted, lest mysteries of such greatness come to the Greeks, lest the extravagant, flaccid and (as it were) dandified Greek idiom extinguish something stately and concise, the energetic idiom of usage. For the Greeks have empty speeches, O king, that are energetic only in what they demonstrate, and this is the philosophy of the Greeks, an inane foolosophy of speeches. We, by contrast, use not speeches but sounds that are full of action. (Chapter XVI) — Hermes Trismegistus

Religion mattered at a deep level, which must help to explain why none of these people went over to Islam; but in most cases it did not direct their lives, nor did it prevent some of them from cultivating their connection with a powerful relative who was a Muslim convert. Whilst the fact that they were Catholics from one of Christendom's frontier zones may have given them an enhanced sense of their Catholicism, the fact that they were Albanians, connected by language, blood and history to Ottoman subjects and Ottoman territory, gave them an ability to see things also from something more like an Ottoman perspective — Noel Malcolm

All my life I have overheard, all my life I have listened to what people will let slip when they think you are part of their we. A we is so powerful. It is the most corrupt and formidable institution on earth. Its hands are full of the crispest and most persuasive currency. Its mouth is full of received, repeating language. The we closes its ranks to protect the space inside it, where the air is different. It does not protect people. It protects its own shape. — Patricia Lockwood

Make a promise to yourself right now, that you will choose your thoughts and words wisely, that you will no longer use disempowered language about yourself, and nor will you ever negatively define yourself by what has occurred in your past. — Miya Yamanouchi

Kissed. Cath loved that word. She used it sparingly in her fic, just because it felt so powerful. It felt like kissing to say it. Well done, English Language. — Rainbow Rowell

Body language is more powerful than words. — Ricky Gervais

Assembly, while extremely powerful, is simply too difficult to program large applications and hard to read or interpret in a logical way. C is a compiled language, which creates fast and efficient executable files. It is also a small "what you see is all you get" language: — Wiki Books

There are tines in the prophetic ministry when words we receive for others must stay in the throne room...they are more powerful when converted into crafted prayer and spoken to the father than when put into prophetic language and ministered to human beings. — Graham Cooke

I actually chafe at describing myself as masculine. For one thing, masculinity itself is such an expansive territory, encompassing boundaries of nationality, race, and class. Most importantly, individuals blaze their own trails across this landscape. And it's hard for me to label the intricate matrix of my gender as simply masculine.

To me, branding individual self-expression as simply feminine or masculine is like asking poets: Do you write in English or Spanish? The question leaves out the possibilities that the poetry is woven in Cantonese or Ladino, Swahili or Arabic. The question deals only with the system of language that the poet has been taught. It ignores the words each writer hauls up, hand over hand, from a common well. The music words make when finding themselves next to each other for the first time. The silences echoing in the space between ideas. The powerful winds of passion and belief that move the poet to write. — Leslie Feinberg

After studying the Hungarian language for years, I can confidently conclude that had Hungarian been my mother tongue, it would have been more precious. Simply because through this extraordinary, ancient and powerful language it is possible to precisely describe the tiniest differences and the most secretive tremors of emotions. — George Bernard Shaw

Teachers were powerful enough to kill the indigenous languages: they are not powerful enough to bring them back to life. — Andrew Dalby

Physical presence in the time of crisis is the most powerful gift you can give if your spouse's primary love language is receiving gifts. Your body becomes the symbol of your love. — Gary Chapman

He was a sincere husband who failed to understand the tremendous power of presence. His being there for his wife was more important than anything else in her mind. Physical presence in the time of crisis is the most powerful gift you can give if your spouse's primary love language is receiving gifts. Your body becomes the symbol of your love. Remove the symbol, and the sense of love evaporates. — Gary Chapman

The study of universal grammar is a joint venture between globetrotting theoreticians who worry about impossible grammars and laboratory experimentalists who put young children through these impossible grammars. Perhaps, as in physics, one of these days there will be a grand unified theory of universal grammar. Linguistics today is where physics was in the age of Galileo and Kepler. The collection of principles may one day be replaced by one powerful principle - perhaps just the principle of recursion. that underlies them all. Universal grammar is still waiting for its Newton and Einstein. Whatever it turns out to be, its job its to keep children on the right track to their language. — Charles Yang

People followed him not because of his idea of a changed America. People followed him because of their idea of a changed America. The part of the brain that influences our behavior and decisions does not have the capacity for language. We have trouble saying clearly, in emotional terms, why we do what we do, and offer rationalizations that, though valid and true, are not powerful enough to inspire others. — Simon Sinek

The word is a thing of mystery, so volatile that it vanishes almost on the lip, yet so powerful that it decides fates and determines the meaning of existence. A frail structure shaped by fleeting sound, it yet contains the eternal: truth. Words come from within, rising as sounds fashioned by the organs of a man's body, as expressions of his heart and spirit. He utters them, yet he does not create them, for they already existed independently of him. One word is related to another; together they form the great unity of language, that empire of truth-forms in which a man lives. — Romano Guardini

The language we use is extremely powerful. It is the frame through which we perceive and describe ourselves and our picture of the world. — Iben Dissing Sandahl

Each of you possesses the most powerful, dangerous and subversive trait that natural selection has ever devised. It's a piece of neural audio technology for rewiring other people's minds. I'm talking about your language. — Mark Pagel

We often hear it said that it is the task of art to express the inexpressible: it is contrary which must be said (with no intention of paradox): the whole task of art is to unexpress the expressible, to kidnap from the world's language, which is the poor and powerful language of the passion, another speech, an exact speech. — Roland Barthes

To live in a world of photographs is to live in a world of substitutes ... or so it seems, whose actual referent is always the other, the described, the reality of a world once removed. I prefer, on the other hand, to look at the photographs as something real and of my world, a strange and powerful thing ... part of a language, a system of communication, an economy of signs. — Sarah Charlesworth

To make a programming language powerful, you need to make it expressive. Having — Conrad Barski

The fact that all our ape cousins - chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans - can acquire signs - is powerful evidence that our hominid ancestors' first language was gestural and that the vocal version of language was a relatively recent development. My own guess is that vocal language began emerging about 200,000 years ago. — Roger Fouts

Body language is a very powerful tool. We had body language before we had speech, and apparently, 80% of what you understand in a conversation is read through the body, not the words. — Deborah Bull

Sorry' is, indeed, one of the most difficult and most powerful words in the English language, provided one can feel and say it at the same time. It's difficult because you sincerely need to feel the pain of the other person and rise above your ego to say it; it's powerful because you overwhelm the other with the opposite reaction of what they were expecting. — Uday Mukerji

People are often asking me if the things in my short stories really happened to me. I always think this is the same question to ask of a life - did this really happen to me? The body doesn't lie. But when we bring language to the body, isn't it always already an act of fiction? With its delightfully designed composition and color saturations and graphic patterns? Its style and vantage point? Its insistence on the mind's powerful force of recollection in the face of the raw and brutal fact that the only witness was the body? — Lidia Yuknavitch

We make something sacramental when we make it like the kingdom. Marriage is sacramental when it is characterized by mutual love and submission. A meal is sacramental when the rich and poor, powerful and marginalized, sinners and saints share equal status around the table. A local church is sacramental when it is a place where the last are first and the first are last and where those who hunger and thirst are fed. And the church universal is sacramental when it knows no geographic boundaries, no political parties, no single language or culture, and when it advances not through power and might, but through acts of love, joy, and peace and missions of mercy, kindness, humility. — Rachel Held Evans

He told us that he had made a mistake by leaving the word love out of the Pyramid of Success. And that love is the single most powerful and important word in our language and culture. And until we allow the power of love to supersede the love of power, none of us has any chance of success at all. There — Bill Walton

I think there's a part of my brain where food, language, and memory all intersect, and it's really powerful. I think I'm not alone in this. — Kate Christensen

God who doesn't know what is going to happen to him with language. And with names. In short, God doesn't yet know what he really wants: this is the finitude of a God who doesn't know what he wants with respect to the animal, that is to say, with respect to the life of the living as such, a God who sees something coming without seeing it coming, a God who will say "I am that I am" without knowing what he is going to see when a poet enters the scene to give his name to living things. This powerful yet deprived "in order to see" that is God's, the first stroke of time, before time, God's exposure to surprise, to the event of what is going to occur between man and animal, this time before time has always made me dizzy. — David Wills

Never underestimate the value of knowing another's language. It can be far more powerful than swords and arrows. — Melina Marchetta

The benefits of science are not only material ones. The truths that science teaches are of common interest the world over. The language of science is universal, and is a powerful force in bringing the peoples of the world closer together. — Arthur Compton

The powerful intellect leashed by an impoverished vocabulary is a myth. Without a vocabulary, a language, the intellect cannot develop. — T. Geronimo Johnson

We often use strong language not to express a powerful emotion but to evoke it in us. — Eric Hoffer

It is pretended that, as in the Preamble to the Constitution, it is "we the people" who wrote that document, rather than fifty-five privileged white males whose class interest required a strong central government. That use of government for class purposes, to serve the needs of the wealthy and powerful, has continued throughout American history, down to the present day. It is disguised by language that suggests all of us - rich and poor and middle class - have a common interest. — Howard Zinn

Liberal democracy is a powerful unifying mechanism, blurring differences between people and imposing uniformity of views, behavior, and language. — Ryszard Legutko

In Nonviolent Communication you will find an amazingly effective language for saying what's on your mind and in your heart. Like so many essential and elegant systems, it's simple on the surface, challenging to use in the heat of the moment and powerful in its results. — Vicki Robin

Musicians do not have to be believed in. We do not have to be trusted. Our Music speaks for itself without the listener having to know anything about us. Music touches people's emotions in a way that nothing else can. When people find a musician they like, they are usually fans for Life. If they like the musician and his Music, they will open up their hearts to whatever that musician has to say. It matters not what country the musician or the fan comes from. Music is a language that all understand. It goes beyond and breaks down barriers. This makes the musician very powerful, and with power comes responsibility. — Victor L. Wooten

I remember the astonishment I felt when I first read Shakespeare. I expected to receive a powerful esthetic pleasure, but having read, one after the other, works regarded as his best: "King Lear," "Romeo and Juliet," "Hamlet" and "Macbeth," not only did I feel no delight, but I felt an irresistible repulsion and tedium ... Shakespeare can not be recognized either as a great genius, or even as an average author ... far from being the height of perfection, [King Lear] is a very bad, carelessly composed production, ... can not evoke among us anything but aversion and weariness ... All his characters speak, not their own, but always one and the same Shakespearian, pretentious, and unnatural language ... — Leo Tolstoy

Nothing is so easy as to deceive one's self when one does not lack wit and is familiar with all the niceties of language. Language is a prostitute queen who descends and rises to all roles. Disguises herself, arrays herself in fine apparel, hides her head and effaces herself; an advocate who has an answer for everything, who has always foreseen everything, and who assumes a thousand forms in order to be right. The most honorable of men is he who thinks best and acts best, but the most powerful is he who is best able to talk and write — George Sand

The problem with the word "vagina" is that vaginas seem to be just straight-out bad luck. Only a masochist would want one, because only awful things happen to them. Vaginas get torn. Vaginas get "examined.".. No. Let's clear this up right now - I don't actually have a vagina. I never have. I, personally, have a cunt. Cunt is a proper, old, historic, strong word, and it doubles up as the most potent swear word in the English language. Yeah. That's how powerful it is, guys. If I tell you what I've got down there, old ladies and clerics might faint. I like how shocked people are when you say "cunt." Compared to this, the most powerful swear word men have got out of their privates is "dick," which is frankly vanilla. In a culture where nearly everything female is still seen as squeam-inducing and/or weak - menstruation, menopause, just the sheer, simple act of calling someone "a girl" - I love that "cunt" stands on its own, as the supreme, unvanquishable word. — Caitlin Moran

In order to be heard by the oppressing class, one must speak as a member of it. Not only the language, but the diction. The accusation of tyranny, however well-founded in fact, is dismissed unless it is delivered in the manner that power recognizes as powerful. — James S.A. Corey

Personally, I think so-called "common language" is more interesting and apropos than "proper English"; it's passionate and powerful in ways that "wherefore art thou ass and thy elbow" just isn't. — J.R. Ward

A scientist with a poet's command of language, Cristina Eisenberg writes with precision and passion ... takes her reader on a breathtaking, sometimes heartbreaking tour of the planet from the Gulf of Maine to the Amazonian rain forests, the tropical coral reefs to old growth forests of the Northwest as well as rivers, lakes, and wetlands. I found the wealth of information not only accessible but riveting ... Eisenberg's powerful, beautifully written book ... has the potential to open many people's eyes, minds, and hearts. — Elizabeth Cunningham

A powerful programming language is more than just a means for instructing a computer to perform tasks. The language also serves as a framework within which we organize our ideas about processes. — Hal Abelson

Our all-powerful God got so scared He scattered the human race across the face of the earth, and shattered their language to keep His children apart. — Chuck Palahniuk

Chemistry is a gibberish of Latin and German; but in Leibig's hands it becomes a powerful language. — Jacob Grimm

Lisp was far more powerful and flexible than any other language of its day; in fact, it is still a better design than most languages of today, twenty-five years later. Lisp freed ITS's hackers to think in unusual and creative ways. It was a major factor in their successes, and remains one of hackerdom's favorite languages. — Eric S. Raymond

Of course, English is a very powerful language, a colonizer's language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures - its cruelty is its vitality. — Louise Erdrich

The photograph is an undeniably powerful medium. Free from the constraints of language, and harnessing the unique qualities of a single moment frozen in time. — Steve McCurry

One. Word.
NO.
No is a powerful word. To me, it's the single most powerful word in the English language. Said clearly, strongly and with enough frequency and force, it can alter the course of history. — Shonda Rhimes

When I consider the multitude of associated forces which are diffused through nature - when I think of that calm balancing of their energies which enables those most powerful in themselves, most destructive to the world's creatures and economy, to dwell associated together and be made subservient to the wants of creation, I rise from the contemplation more than ever impressed with the wisdom, the beneficence, and grandeur, beyond our language to express, of the Great Disposer of us all. — Michael Faraday

As well as being the banners and ensigns of human groups, languages guard our memories too. Even when they are unwritten, languages are the most powerful tools we have to conserve our past knowledge, transmitting it, ever and anon, to the next generation. Any human language binds together a human community, by giving it a network of communication; but it also dramatizes it, providing the means to tell, and to remember, its stories. — Nicholas Ostler

Those upper classes, to rule, needed to make concessions to the middle class, without damage to their own wealth or power, at the expense of slaves, Indians, and poor whites. This bought loyalty. And to bind that loyalty with something more powerful even than material advantage, the ruling group found, in the 1760s and 1770s, a wonderfully useful device. That device was the language of liberty and equality, which could unite just enough whites to fight a Revolution against England, without ending either slavery or inequality. — Howard Zinn

The physical language of the body is so much more powerful than words. — Bill Irwin

Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, sometimes two or three powerful ideas. Like language itself, a technology predisposes us to favor and value certain perspectives and accomplishments and to subordinate others. Every technology has a philosophy, which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards. — Neil Postman

I hope you never hear those words. Your mom. She died. They are different than other words. They are too big to fit in your ears. They belong to some strange, heavy, powerful language that pounds away at the side of your head, a wrecking ball coming at you again and again, until finally, the words crack a hole large enough to fit inside your brain. And in so doing, they split you apart. — Mitch Albom

The feeling that passed between them, so powerful there was no language to describe it... It was not mere friendship, but something born of and strengthened by it. — Sarah J. Maas

Perhaps there is a provisional solution to this epistemological mess, which is to be located in the phrase it is as if. This phrase is of course precisely the announcement of an analogy. And on reflection, it is admittedly a halting problem, but jumping out of it, there is something quite suggestive and powerful in this formulation, something very specifically human. Possibly this formulation itself is the deep diagnostic of all human cognition - the tell, as they say, meaning the thing that tells, the giveaway. In the infinite black space of ignorance, it is as if stands as the basic operation of cognition, the mark perhaps of consciousness itself. Human language: it is as if it made sense. — Kim Stanley Robinson

I cannot combine some characters
dhcmrlchtdj
which the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning. No one can articulate a syllable which is not filled with tenderness and fear, which is not, in one of these languages, the powerful name of a god. To speak is to fall into tautology. — Jorge Luis Borges

We have won so many contests, leveled so many barriers, that the changes wrought by the women's movement are widely viewed as irreversible, even by feminism's most committed antagonists. Yet, as women near the finish line, we are distracted. We have stopped to gather glittery trinkets from an apparent admirer. The admirer is the marketplace, and the trinkets are the bounty of a commercial culture, which has deployed the language of liberation as a new and powerful tool of subjugation. — Susan Faludi

Hip-hop culture is probably one of the most powerful things to come out of America in a long time - everything from the music to the art to the dance to the language. — Will.i.am

An accurate accent is powerful because it is the ultimate gesture of empathy. It connects you to another person's culture in a way that words never can, because you have bent your body as well as your mind to match that person's culture. Anyone can learn "bawn-JURE" in a few seconds. To learn how bonjour fits your companion's mouth and tongue; to learn how to manipulate the muscles, the folds, and even the texture of your throat and lips to match your companion's -- this is an unmistakable, undeniable, and irresistable gesture of care. — Gabriel Wyner

Words alike make the destiny of empires and of individuals. Ambition, love, hate, interest, vanity, have words for their engines, and need none more powerful. Language is a fifth element - the one by which all the others are swayed. — Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Love is the single most powerful and important word and notion in culture and language. Until the power of love supersedes the love of power we have no chance of ever being successful. — Bill Walton

Rape culture is an environment in which rape is prevalent and in which sexual violence against women is normalized and excused in the media and popular culture. Rape culture is perpetuated through the use of misogynistic language, the objectification of women's bodies, and the glamorization of sexual violence, thereby creating a society that disregards women's rights and safety. Rape culture affects every woman. Most women and girls limit their behavior because of the existence of rape. Most women and girls live in fear of rape. Men, in general, do not. That's how rape functions as a powerful means by which the whole female population is held in a subordinate position to the whole male population, even though many men don't rape, and many women are never victims of rape. — Rebecca Solnit

It is a civilizational wake-up call. A powerful message - spoken in the language of fires, floods, droughts, and extinctions - telling us that we need an entirely new economic model and a new way of sharing this planet. — Naomi Klein

I knew that some victims of powerful self-loathing turn out to be dangerous, violent, reproducing the enemy who has humiliated them over and over. Others surrender their identity; melt into a structure that delivers the strong persona they lack. Most others, however, grow beyond it. But there are some who collapse, silently, anonymously, with no voice to express or acknowledge it. They are invisible. The death of self-esteem can occur quickly, easily in children, before their ego has "legs," so to speak. Couple the vulnerability of youth with indifferent parents, dismissive adults, and a world, which, in its language, laws, and images, re-enforces despair, and the journey to destruction is sealed. — Toni Morrison