Users don’t read
Users only scan
Users haven’t got
No attention span
-- Dean Allen, Textism

One of the pleasures of reading old letters is the knowledge that they need no answer. -- George Gordon, Lord Byron

There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope. -- Oscar Wilde

Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak it to? -- Clarence Darrow

Why did the Roman Empire collapse? What is the Latin for office automation?

If you lose your temper at a newspaper columnist, he'll get rich, or famous or both.

Rarely do people communicate; they just take turns talking.

Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.

25,000

Average number of words in the written vocabulary of a 6 to 14 year-old American child in 1945 -- H. D. Rinsland, A Basic Vocabulary of Elementary School Children, Macmillan (N.Y.C.)

10,000

Average number today -- Prof. Gary Ingersoll, University of Indiana

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves. -- Don Marquis

Go on writing plays, my boy. One of these days a London producer will go into his office and say to his secretary, 'Is there a play from Shaw this morning? and when she says 'No,' he will say, 'Well, then we'll have to start on the rubbish.' And that's your chance, my boy. -- G. B. Shaw to William Douglas Home

I can't understand why a person will take a year or two to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars. -- Fred Allen

Words that emanate from the heart enter into the heart of another. -- Midrash

Everything bows to success, even grammar.

After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations. -- H. L. Mencken, on Shakespeare

'I don't even have an e-mail address. I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages. -- Umberto Eco, quoted in the New Yorker

If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world. -- Ludwig Wittgenstein

An ambassador is an honest man sent abroad to lie and intrigue for the benefit of his country. -- Sir Henry Wotton, 1568-1639

Jargon systematically twists language in order to subvert rational thought and reduce political discourse to the making and breaking of mental associations among vaguely defined symbols, often by means of extreme emotional manipulation -- thus the shouting. In the process, political discourse is reduced to the most primitive psychological level, and the toxic rhetoric that results can be best understood using psychological ideas such as projection. -- Phil Agre, Understanding Jargon

If I do not want others to quote me, I do not speak. -- Phil Wayne