More has been screwed up on the battlefield and misunderstood in the Pentagon because of a lack of understanding of the English language than any other single factor.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
War is what happens when language fails.
The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.
There are so many people in the world who cannot read English or French or whatever.
It was all completely incomprehensible to me. I was fearful of the language. You had to look up every third word.
We tend to look through language and not realize how much power language has.
I think we're still in a muddle with our language, because once you get words and a spoken language it gets harder to communicate.
Language is one component of the human cognitive capacity which happens to be fairly amenable to enquiry. So we know a good deal about that.
Language is an intrinsic part of who we are and what has, for good or evil, happened to us.
I feel impelled to speak today in a language that in a sense is new-one which I, who have spent so much of my life in the military profession, would have preferred never to use. That new language is the language of atomic warfare.
It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection.
No opposing quotes found.