Babel-17

by Samuel R. Delany

when you learn another tongue, you learn the way another people see the world, the universe.”

But today a person who learns the rules of art well is a little rarer than the person who learns the rules of science.

We have to go to another language in order to think about the problem clearly without going through all sorts of roundabout paths for the proper aspects of what we want to deal with.”

“Butcher, there are certain ideas which have words for them. If you don’t know the words, you can’t know the ideas. And if you don’t have the idea, you don’t have the answer.”