Just As The Introduction Of The Irrational

The Lore Of Our Fathers Is A Fabric Of Sentences. In Our Hands It Develops And Changes, Through More Or Less Arbitrary And Deliberate Revisions And Additions Of Our Own, More Or Less Directly Occasioned By The Continuing Stimulation Of Our Sense Organs. It Is A Pale Gray Lore, Black With Fact And White With Convention. But I Have Found No Substantial Reasons For Concluding That There Are Any Quite Black Threads In It, Or Any White Ones.

English General And Singular Terms, Identity, Quantification, And The Whole Bag Of Ontological Tricks May Be Correlated With Elements Of The Native Language In Any Of Various Mutually Incompatible Ways, Each Compatible With All Possible Linguistic Data, And None Preferable To Another Save As Favored By A Rationalization Of The Native Language That Is Simple And Natural To Us.

Necessity Resides In The Way We Talk About Things, Not In The Things We Talk About.

We Cannot Stem Linguistic Change, But We Can Drag Our Feet. If Each Of Us Were To Defy Alexander Pope And Be The Last To Lay The Old Aside, It Might Not Be A Better World, But It Would Be A Lovelier Language.

Life Is What The Least Of Us Make The Most Of Us Feel The Least Of Us Make The Most Of.