S. I. Hayakawa quotes
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“It is the individual who knows how little they know about themselves who stands the most reasonable chance of finding out something about themselves before they die.”
-- S. I. Hayakawa -
“Agreement is brought about by changing people's minds - other people's.”
-- S. I. Hayakawa -
“It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.”
-- S. I. Hayakawa -
“In the age of television, image becomes more important than substance.”
-- S. I. Hayakawa -
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“You guys are both saying the same thing. The only reason you're arguing is because you're using different words.”
-- S. I. Hayakawa -
“In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read.”
-- S. I. HayakawaSource : 1941 Language in Action.
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“Learning to write is learning to think. You don't know anything clearly unless you can state it in writing.”
-- S. I. Hayakawa -
“I'm going to speak my mind because I have nothing to lose.”
-- S. I. Hayakawa -
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“Notice the difference between what happens when a man says to himself, I have failed three times, and what happens when he says, I am a failure.”
-- S. I. Hayakawa -
“Animals struggle with each other for food or for leadership, but they do not, like human beings, struggle with each other for thatthat stands for food or leadership: such things as our paper symbols of wealth (money, bonds, titles), badges of rank to wear on our clothes, or low-number license plates, supposed by some people to stand for social precedence. For animals the relationship in which one thing stands for something else does not appear to exist except in very rudimentary form.”
-- S. I. Hayakawa -
“How anybody dresses is indicative of his self-concept. If students are dirty and ragged, it indicates they are not interested in tidying up their intellects either.”
-- S. I. Hayakawa -
“The traditional educational theory is to the effect that the way to bring up children is to keep them innocent (i.e., believing in biological, political, and socioeconomic fairy tales) as long as possible ... that students should be given the best possible maps of the territories of experience in order that they may be prepared for life, is not as popular as might be assumed.”
-- S. I. Hayakawa -
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“We should keep [the Panama Canal]. After all, we stole it fair and square.”
-- S. I. Hayakawa -
“Republicans are people who, if you were drowning 50 feet from shore, would throw you a 25-foot rope and tell you to swim the other 25 feet because it would be good for your character. Democrats would throw you a hundred-foot rope and then walk away looking for other good deeds to do.”
-- S. I. Hayakawa -
“Advertising is a symbol-manipulating occupation”
-- S. I. Hayakawa -
“Definitions, contrary to popular opinion, tell us nothing about things. They only describe people's linguistic habits; that is, they tell us what noises people make under what conditions.”
-- S. I. HayakawaSource : S. I. HAYAKAWA (1941). “LANGUAGE IN ACTION”
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“There is only one thing age can give you, and that is wisdom.”
-- S. I. Hayakawa -
“Ever since man began to till the soil and learned not to eat the seed grain but to plant it and wait for harvest, the postponement of gratification has been the basis of a higher standard of living and of civilization.”
-- S. I. Hayakawa -
“If you see in any given situation only what everybody else can see, you can be said to be so much a representative of your culture that you are a victim of it.”
-- S. I. Hayakawa -
“Bilingualism for the individual is fine, but not for a country.”
-- S. I. Hayakawa -
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“Few people...have had much training in listening. The training of most oververbalized professional intellectuals is in the opposite direction. Living in a competitive culture, most of us are most of the time chiefly concerned with getting our own views across, and we tend to find other people's speeches a tedious interruption of the flow of our own ideas.”
-- S. I. Hayakawa -
“Good teachers never say anything. What they do is create the conditions under which learning takes place.”
-- S. I. Hayakawa -
“McDonalds in Tokyo is a terrible revenge for Pearl Harbor.”
-- S. I. Hayakawa -
“Patriotic societies seem to think that the way to educate school children in a democracy is to stage bigger and better flag-saluting.”
-- S. I. Hayakawa -
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“English is the key to full participation in the opportunities of American life.”
-- S. I. Hayakawa -
“In the case of drama (stage, movies, television ), there appear to be people in almost every audience who never quite fully realize that a play is a set of fictional, symbolic representations. An actor is one who symbolizes other people, real or imagined. [...] Also some years ago it was reported that when Edward G. Robinson, who used to play gangster roles with extraordinary vividness, visited Chicago, local hoodlums would telephone him at his hotel to pay their professional respects.”
-- S. I. HayakawaSource : "Language in Thought and Action". Book by S. I. Hayakawa (p.27-28), 1991.
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“People who think of themselves as tough-minded and realistic, among them influential political leaders and businessmen as well as go-getters and hustlers of smaller caliber, tend to take it for granted that human nature is selfish and that life is a struggle in which only the fittest may survive. According to this philosophy, the basic law by which man must live, in spite of his surface veneer of civilization, is the law of the jungle. The "fittest" are those who can bring to the struggle superior force, superior cunning, and superior ruthlessness.”
-- S. I. Hayakawa -
“If everybody is rewarded just for being alive, you get the same sort of effect as you do when you reward every student just for being enrolled. You destroy not only education, you destroy society by giving A's to everyone. This is a philosophical consideration that bothers me very much as I sit in the United States Senate and see the great budget allocations going through.”
-- S. I. Hayakawa -
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“Those terrifying verbal jungles called laws are simply such directives, accumulated, codified, and systematized through the centuries.”
-- S. I. Hayakawa -
“We live in a highly competitive society, each of us trying to outdo the other in wealth, in popularity or social prestige, in dress, in scholastic grades or golf scores. One is often tempted to say that conflict, rather than cooperation, is the great governing principle of human life.”
-- S. I. Hayakawa
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