"We have too many high sounding words and too few actions that correspond with them."
— Abigail Adams

"Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by."
— A.S. Byatt

"Few activities are as delightful as learning new vocabulary."
— Tim Gunn (Tim Gunn: A Guide to Quality, Taste and Style)

"A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one's vocabulary and the greater one's awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one's thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing."
— Henry Hazlitt

"Every one has experienced how learning an appropriate name for what was dim and vague cleared up and crystallized the whole matter. Some meaning seems distinct almost within reach, but is elusive; it refuses to condense into definite form; the attaching of a word somehow (just how, it is almost impossible to say) puts limits around the meaning, draws it out from the void, makes it stand out as an entity on its own account."
— John Dewey (How We Think)

"We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology's virtues. "
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)