America is an open society, more open than any other in the world. People of every race, of every color, of every culture are welcomed here to create a new life for themselves and their families. And what do these people who enter into the American mainstream have in common? English, our shared common language.

S. I. Hayakawa

Categorized in : America Race Color

Republicans are people who, if you were drowning 50 feet from shore, would throw you a 25-foot rope and tell you to swim the other 25 feet because it would be good for your character. Democrats would throw you a hundred-foot rope and then walk away looking for other good deeds to do.

S. I. Hayakawa

feet character people

It is the individual who knows how little they know about themselves who stands the most reasonable chance of finding out something about themselves before they die.

S. I. Hayakawa

finding-yourself chance littles

The meanings of words are not in the words, they are in us.

S. I. Hayakawa

meanings-of-words

Learning to write is learning to think. You don't know anything clearly unless you can state it in writing.

S. I. Hayakawa

writing inspirational thinking

In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read.

S. I. Hayakawa

real reading book

It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

S. I. Hayakawa

reading life book

Language is a unifying instrument which binds people together. When people speak one language they become as one, they become a society.

S. I. Hayakawa

language together people

Few people...have had much training in listening. The training of most oververbalized professional intellectuals is in the opposite direction. Living in a competitive culture, most of us are most of the time chiefly concerned with getting our own views across, and we tend to find other people's speeches a tedious interruption of the flow of our own ideas.

S. I. Hayakawa

views opposites ideas

People who think of themselves as tough-minded and realistic, among them influential political leaders and businessmen as well as go-getters and hustlers of smaller caliber, tend to take it for granted that human nature is selfish and that life is a struggle in which only the fittest may survive. According to this philosophy, the basic law by which man must live, in spite of his surface veneer of civilization, is the law of the jungle. The "fittest" are those who can bring to the struggle superior force, superior cunning, and superior ruthlessness.

S. I. Hayakawa

selfish struggle philosophy

Good teachers never say anything. What they do is create the conditions under which learning takes place.

S. I. Hayakawa

teaching education teacher

You just don't know anything unless you can write it. Sure you can argue things out in your own head and bring them out at parties, but in order to argue anything thoroughly, you must be able to put it down on paper.

S. I. Hayakawa

party writing order

Bilingualism for the individual is fine, but not for a country.

S. I. Hayakawa

bilingualism individual country

The traditional educational theory is to the effect that the way to bring up children is to keep them innocent (i.e., believing in biological, political, and socioeconomic fairy tales) as long as possible ... that students should be given the best possible maps of the territories of experience in order that they may be prepared for life, is not as popular as might be assumed.

S. I. Hayakawa

education believe children

We should keep [the Panama Canal]. After all, we stole it fair and square.

S. I. Hayakawa

squares war peace

You guys are both saying the same thing. The only reason you're arguing is because you're using different words.

S. I. Hayakawa

guy different arguing

If you see in any given situation only what everybody else can see, you can be said to be so much a representative of your culture that you are a victim of it.

S. I. Hayakawa

creativity work ideas

If everybody is rewarded just for being alive, you get the same sort of effect as you do when you reward every student just for being enrolled. You destroy not only education, you destroy society by giving A's to everyone. This is a philosophical consideration that bothers me very much as I sit in the United States Senate and see the great budget allocations going through.

S. I. Hayakawa

philosophical society giving

Animals struggle with each other for food or for leadership, but they do not, like human beings, struggle with each other for thatthat stands for food or leadership: such things as our paper symbols of wealth (money, bonds, titles), badges of rank to wear on our clothes, or low-number license plates, supposed by some people to stand for social precedence. For animals the relationship in which one thing stands for something else does not appear to exist except in very rudimentary form.

S. I. Hayakawa

clothes struggle animal

There is only one thing age can give you, and that is wisdom.

S. I. Hayakawa

aging age giving

I believe we are being dishonest with language minority groups if we tell them they can take full part in American life without learning the English language.

S. I. Hayakawa

minorities groups believe