S. I. Hayakawa Quotes

It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

We should keep [the Panama Canal]. After all, we stole it fair and square.

Republicans are people who, if you were drowning 50 feet from shore, would throw you a 25-foot rope and tell you to swim the other 25 feet because it would be good for your character. Democrats would throw you a hundred-foot rope and then walk away looking for other good deeds to do.

It is the individual who knows how little they know about themselves who stands the most reasonable chance of finding out something about themselves before they die.

Learning to write is learning to think. You don't know anything clearly unless you can state it in writing.

In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read.

The meanings of words are not in the words, they are in us.

Few people...have had much training in listening. The training of most oververbalized professional intellectuals is in the opposite direction. Living in a competitive culture, most of us are most of the time chiefly concerned with getting our own views across, and we tend to find other people's speeches a tedious interruption of the flow of our own ideas.

Language is a unifying instrument which binds people together. When people speak one language they become as one, they become a society.

People who think of themselves as tough-minded and realistic, among them influential political leaders and businessmen as well as go-getters and hustlers of smaller caliber, tend to take it for granted that human nature is selfish and that life is a struggle in which only the fittest may survive. According to this philosophy, the basic law by which man must live, in spite of his surface veneer of civilization, is the law of the jungle. The "fittest" are those who can bring to the struggle superior force, superior cunning, and superior ruthlessness.

Bilingualism for the individual is fine, but not for a country.

The traditional educational theory is to the effect that the way to bring up children is to keep them innocent (i.e., believing in biological, political, and socioeconomic fairy tales) as long as possible ... that students should be given the best possible maps of the territories of experience in order that they may be prepared for life, is not as popular as might be assumed.

You just don't know anything unless you can write it. Sure you can argue things out in your own head and bring them out at parties, but in order to argue anything thoroughly, you must be able to put it down on paper.

Good teachers never say anything. What they do is create the conditions under which learning takes place.

You guys are both saying the same thing. The only reason you're arguing is because you're using different words.

America is an open society, more open than any other in the world. People of every race, of every color, of every culture are welcomed here to create a new life for themselves and their families. And what do these people who enter into the American mainstream have in common? English, our shared common language.

If you see in any given situation only what everybody else can see, you can be said to be so much a representative of your culture that you are a victim of it.

In the age of television, image becomes more important than substance.

If everybody is rewarded just for being alive, you get the same sort of effect as you do when you reward every student just for being enrolled. You destroy not only education, you destroy society by giving A's to everyone. This is a philosophical consideration that bothers me very much as I sit in the United States Senate and see the great budget allocations going through.

I'm going to speak my mind because I have nothing to lose.

Animals struggle with each other for food or for leadership, but they do not, like human beings, struggle with each other for thatthat stands for food or leadership: such things as our paper symbols of wealth (money, bonds, titles), badges of rank to wear on our clothes, or low-number license plates, supposed by some people to stand for social precedence. For animals the relationship in which one thing stands for something else does not appear to exist except in very rudimentary form.

English is the key to full participation in the opportunities of American life.

There is only one thing age can give you, and that is wisdom.

I believe we are being dishonest with language minority groups if we tell them they can take full part in American life without learning the English language.

Ever since man began to till the soil and learned not to eat the seed grain but to plant it and wait for harvest, the postponement of gratification has been the basis of a higher standard of living and of civilization.

The great thing about the United States is our ability to absorb foreign people and make them a part of us.

Notice the difference between what happens when a man says to himself, I have failed three times, and what happens when he says, I am a failure.

McDonalds in Tokyo is a terrible revenge for Pearl Harbor.

The United States is enriched by many cultures, and united by a single common language.

The last thing a scientist would do is cling to a map because he inherited it from his grandfather, or because it was used by George Washington or Abraham Lincoln.

The language we share is at the core of our identity as citizens, and our ticket to full participation in American political life. We can speak any language we want at the dinner table, but English is the language of public discourse, or the marketplace and of the voting booth.

In the case of drama (stage, movies, television ), there appear to be people in almost every audience who never quite fully realize that a play is a set of fictional, symbolic representations. An actor is one who symbolizes other people, real or imagined. [...] Also some years ago it was reported that when Edward G. Robinson, who used to play gangster roles with extraordinary vividness, visited Chicago, local hoodlums would telephone him at his hotel to pay their professional respects.

Patriotic societies seem to think that the way to educate school children in a democracy is to stage bigger and better flag-saluting.

English, our common language, binds our diverse people.

If I spoke no English, my world would be limited to the Japanese-speaking community, and no matter how talented I was, I could never do business, seek employment or take part in public affairs outside that community.

Agreement is brought about by changing people's minds - other people's.

How anybody dresses is indicative of his self-concept. If students are dirty and ragged, it indicates they are not interested in tidying up their intellects either.

The English Language Amendment says above all, 'Let's see to it that our children, our young people, learn English. Let us not deny them the opportunity to participate in American life, so that they can go as far as their dreams and talents can take them.

Those terrifying verbal jungles called laws are simply such directives, accumulated, codified, and systematized through the centuries.

Definitions, contrary to popular opinion, tell us nothing about things. They only describe people's linguistic habits; that is, they tell us what noises people make under what conditions.

Advertising is a symbol-manipulating occupation

The United States, a land of immigrants from every corner of the world, has been strengthened and unified because its newcomers have historically chosen ultimately to forgo their native language for the English language. We have all benefited from the sharing of ideas, of cultures and beliefs, made possible by a common language. We have all enriched each other.

We live in a highly competitive society, each of us trying to outdo the other in wealth, in popularity or social prestige, in dress, in scholastic grades or golf scores. One is often tempted to say that conflict, rather than cooperation, is the great governing principle of human life.