Ruth Hubbard, Women Look at Biology Without words to objectify and categorize our sensations and place them in relation to one another, we cannot evolve a tradition of what is real in the world. Nothing can be more depressing than to expose, naked to the light of thought, the hideous growth of argot. Indeed it is like a sort of repellent animal intended to dwell in darkness which has been dragged out of its cloaca. One seems to see a horned and living creature viciously struggling to be restored to the place where it belongs. And all of it is alive with the hideous vitality of things that have organized themselves amid disorganization.
Fettered words are terrible words.
The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought. Repression in history leads to conciseness in the historian, and the rocklike hardness of much celebrated prose is due to the tempering of the tyrant. A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.