On Gifts"Johnny Cash sang like he meant business. He didn't get fancy and he didn't send his voice on missions it could not complete, but there was an urgency in his best songs that pounded them home. When he sang something, it stayed sung." - Roger Ebert
On Country Music
"Country music is three chords and the truth." - Harlan Howard
"Country music has always been the best shrink that 15 bucks can buy." - Dierks Bentley
"There is a general place in your brain, I think, reserved for 'melancholy of relationships past.' It grows and prospers as life progresses, forcing you finally, against your better judgment, to listen to country music." - Kary Mullis, Nobel Prize lecture, December, 1993
"I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means put down." - Bob Newhart
"Country songs have always told the best stories and no one - really, no one - has ever done it better than Nashville. All my life I've admired guitarists like Chet Atkins and Roy Clark who touched me through their sound, but it was those Nashville songwriters who got to me through their words." - B.B. King, blues guitarist and singer-songwriter
On Language
"Language etches the grooves through which your thoughts must flow." - Noam Chomsky
"Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind." - Wade Davis, speaking at The Long Now Foundation
"I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant little starbursts of writing from the Book of Revelation than anything else in the English language - and it is not because I am a biblical scholar, or because of any religious faith, but because I love the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music." - Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine
"Everything that we have so far seen to be true of language points to the fact that it is the most significant and colossal work that the human spirit has evolved. Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations." – Edward Sapir, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech
"And one thing we have lost – the courage to make new words or combinations. Somewhere that old bravado has slipped off into a gangrened scholarship. Oh! you can make words if you enclose them in quotation marks. This indicates that it is dialect and cute." – John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters
"The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others." - Alain de Botton, On Love
"Speech is the mother, not the handmaid, of thought." - Karl Kraus
"That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts." - Nietzsche
Johnny Cash, The Man in Black
From Academy of Achievement
Music's Man In Black: An Interview with Johnny Cash
From FORA.tv
A.C. Grayling & Don Watson, It's All Gone to the Dogs - Video
From FORA.tv
Roy Blount Jr., The Sounds, Roots, and History of Words - Video
From YouTube
Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature - Video
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