1.
I was wondering why I was put in prison for working in an African language when I had not been put in prison for working in English. So really, in prison I started thinking more seriously about the relation between language and power.
Ngugi wa Thiong'o
2.
Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.
Roland Barthes
3.
Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.
Adrienne Rich
4.
God is gracious beyond the power of language to describe.
Francis Asbury
5.
Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
6.
Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.
Angela Carter
7.
Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides.
Rita Mae Brown
8.
My words fly up, my thoughts remain below
Claudius
9.
The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
Cynthia Ozick
10.
There are times when the power of language is not the power that is needed.
Leon Wieseltier
11.
Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power.
Paul Engle