Quotes on Semantics :: Finest Quotes

Semantics Quotes

Semantics, or the study of meaning, remained undeveloped, while phonetics made rapid progress and even came to occupy the central place in the scientific study of language.

Roman Jakobson

Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels.

Willard Van Orman Quine

Creative semantics is the key to contemporary government; it consists of talking in strange tongues lest the public learn the inevitable inconveniently early.

George F. Will

It's a matter of semantics, because you are creating an identical twin. Cloning is creating a replica of a person or an animal. This is creating what happens in nature every single day.

Hilton Kort

We are so cleverly manipulated and influenced by the media and establishments on both the right and left, that the truth has become hopelessly lost in semantics.

Jules Carlysle

We are getting into semantics again. If we use words, there is a very grave danger they will be misinterpreted.

Unknown

[Urging Sarkozy to avoid] warlike semantics, ... He needs to stop going with cameras and journalists to poor and sensitive areas.

Azouz Begag

[Such] warlike ... contests this method of becoming submerged by imprecise, warlike semantics.

Azouz Begag

The United States is no longer enemy No. 1, as you know, it's priority No. 1, ... And this is the only difference: semantics.

Oleg Kalugin

All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them.

Felix Frankfurter

I don't want to get bogged down in semantics causing problems.

Pervez Musharraf

Von Neumann languages do not have useful properties for reasoning about programs. Axiomatic and denotational semantics are precise tools for describing and understanding conventional programs, but they only talk about them and cannot alter their ungainly properties. Unlike von Neumann languages, the language of ordinary algebra is suitable both for stating its laws and for transforming an equation into its solution, all within the "language."

John Warner Backus