Quotes: Words.

Words
Clever way of describing a smooth talker.
Words 118 Oedipus: …your barbed designs wrapped up in words of wool. Sophocles. Oedipus at Colonus.

Your words have turned my heart to stone.
Words 98 …by these words you have turned my heart to stone. Hawthorne, Fanshawe

Words won’t stop someone who has already murdered.
Words 34 Oedipus: Mere words will not stay one whom murder never could. Sophocles. Oedipus the King.

Play on words.
Words 405 Farewell, Monsieur du Miroir! Of you, perhaps, as of many men, it may be doubted whether you are the wiser, though your whole business is REFLECTION. [play on words] Hawthorne, Tales and Sketches.

Words will not change the world.
Words 664 …rooted too in that qualified historical fatalism which led him [Kennedy] to doubt whether words, however winged, would by themselves change the world. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days

People of words value the search as much as the truth and delight in clashes of thought and controversy.
Words 147 The genuine man of words himself can get along without faith in absolutes; he values the search for truth as much as truth itself; he delights in the clash of thought and in the give-and-take of controversy. Hoffer, The True Believer

Words 580 JFK: “Our words need merely to carry conviction, not belligerence.” Sorenson, Kennedy.

Words won’t help if we are not strong.
Words 580 JFK: If we are strong, our strength will speak for itself; if we are weak, words will be of no help. Sorenson, Kennedy.

In the Cuba Missile Crisis, the administration used the word “quarantine” as being less belligerent than the word “blockade.”
Words 783 …adopted the term “quarantine” as less belligerent and more applicable to an act of peaceful self-preservation than “blockade.” Sorenson, Kennedy.

In the Cuba Missile Crisis, JFK avoided reference to megatonnage with regard to the missiles and used the word ‘strike’ rather than the words ‘wiping out.’
Words 787 The desire to avoid panic also caused the President to delete all references to the missiles’ megatonnage as compared with Hiroshima, and to speak of ‘striking’ instead of ‘wiping out,’ certain cities. Sorenson, Kennedy.

He used big words for their own sake rather than for communicating ideas.
Words 674 His one striking peculiarity was his…fashion of loving and using big words for their own sakes, and independent of any bearing they might have upon the thought he was proposing to convey. Twain, Roughing It.

We nodded at his stately sentences even if they didn’t mean anything.
Words 674 In truth his air was so natural and so simple that one was always catching himself accepting his stately sentences as meaning something, when they really meant nothing in the world. Twain, Roughing It.

Totalitarian governments don’t like dictionaries since they define words accurately.
Words 257 But authoritarian governments don’t like dictionaries…live by lies and bamboozling abstractions, and can’t afford to have words accurately defined. Clark, Civilization.

Words 11 Ira Wolfert: Words are subjective. Hull, ed. The Writer’s Book.

He who thinks subtly will need words with shades of meaning.
Words 129 Johnson: He that thinks with more extent than another, will want words of larger meaning. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.

Don’t use big words for little matters; don’t use the word “terrible” for something of little consequence.
Words 292 Johnson: Don’t, Sir, accustom yourself to use big words for little matters: it would not be terrible, though I were to be detained some time here…the practice of using words of disproportionate magnitude…. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.

The right word has considerable influence.
Words 292 The right word is always a power…. George Eliot, Middlemarch.

They could not put their understanding into words.
Words 1107 They felt that they could not express in words what was real to their understanding. Tolstoi, War and Peace

Words have effects and personalities can influence even impersonal institutions.
Words 212 …and had proved again for me, as Churchill had proved, that words can affect the course of state affairs and that the personality of a man can be a weight in the balance of institutions, however impersonal and vast. Sevareid, Not So Wild a Dream.

You threw words at me to try to make me lose my fighting heart.
Words 190 Hector to Achilles: Then you turned/ into a word thrower, hoping to make me lose my fighting heart and head in fear of you. Homer, Iliad.

Words can lead to higher thoughts.
Words 277 Lawyer: Can words transport a person?/ Pisthetaerus: Certainly./ By words the mind is raised to higher things. Aristophanes, Birds.

In selling foreign goods, use the word “imported,” not “foreign.”
Words and connotation 76 ...it helped to sell [foreign products] if they were called “imported” rather than “foreign.” Newman, Strictly Speaking.

Words cannot convey the dimensions of truth.
Words and Truth 30 [Words] cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. Emerson, Nature.

Words can diminish truth.
Words and Truth 30 [Words] break, chop, and impoverish [truth]. Emerson, Nature.