Willard Van Orman Quine Language Quotations

Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption.

Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels.

No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.

English general and singular terms, identity, quantification, and the whole bag of ontological tricks may be correlated with elements of the native language in any of various mutually incompatible ways, each compatible with all possible linguistic data, and none preferable to another save as favored by a rationalization of the native language that is simple and natural to us.

Language is a social art.