Quotes on Grammar :: Finest Quotes

Grammar Quotes

There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth.

Anthony Burgess

Grammar and logic free language from being at the mercy of the tone of voice. Grammar protects us against misunderstanding the sound of an uttered name; logic protects us against what we say have double meaning.

Rosenstock Huessy

Arguments over grammar and style are often as fierce as those over IBM versus Mac, and as fruitless as Coke versus Pepsi and boxers versus briefs.

Jack Lynch

Grammar, perfectly understood, enables us not only to express our meaning fully and clearly, but so to express it as to enable us to defy the ingenuity of man to give to our words any other meaning than that which we ourselves intend them to express.

William Cobbett

Only in grammar can you be more than perfect.

William Safire

The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.

Noam Chomsky

Hence, a generative grammar must be a system of rules that can iterate to generate an indefinitely large number of structures. This system of rules can be analyzed into the three major components of a generative grammar: the syntactic, phonological, and semantic components.

Noam Chomsky

Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson: you find the present tense, but the past perfect!

Owens Lee Pomeroy

Good grammar develops over time, so relax and put down the red pen. Kids need to make mistakes in writing to move toward correctness. They freeze up if they think you'll pounce on every error. You want your daughters to keep writing, since this is the best way for them to develop strong usage skills.

Jeff Anderson

No man forgets his original trade: the rights of nations and of kings sink into questions of grammar, if grammarians discuss them.

Samuel Johnson

Do not be surprised when those who ignore the rules of grammar also ignore the law. After all, the law is just so much grammar.

Robert Brault

He constructed a vast labyrinthine of periods, made impassable by the piling-up of clauses upon clauses--clauses in which oversight and bad grammar seemed manifestations of disdain.

Jorge Luis Borges

Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.

Octavio Paz

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.

Louis Aragon

Everything bows to success, even grammar.

Victor Hugo

Statistics is the grammar of science.

Karl Pearson

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar. I never made a mistake in grammar but one in my life and as soon as I done it I seen it.

Carl Sandburg

Why care for grammar as long as we are good? Only in grammar can you be more than perfect.

William Safire

Be able to correctly pronounce the words you would like to speak and have excellent spoken grammar.

Marilyn

A philosopher once said, Half of good philosophy is good grammar".

Martinich

Those that will combat use and custom by the strict rules of grammar do but jest.

Michel De Montaigne

Grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason.

Richard C Trench

To be loose with grammar is to be loose with the worst woman in the world.

Otis C. Edwards

Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them.

Robert Graves

American grammar doesn't have the sturdiness of British grammar (a British advertising man with a proper education can make magazine copy for ribbed condoms sound like the Magna goddam Carta), but it has its own scruffy charm.

Stephen King