J. L. Austin

“Our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connexions they have found worth marking, in the lifetimes of many generations.”

“We are using a sharpened awareness of words to sharpen our perception of, though not as the final arbiter of, the phenomena.”

“You are more than entitled not to know what the word 'performative' means. It is a new word and an ugly word, and perhaps it does not mean anything very much. But at any rate there is one thing in its favor, it is not a profound word.”

“In the history of human inquiry, philosophy has the place of the initial central sun, seminal and tumultuous: from time to time it throws off some portion of itself to take station as a science, a planet, cool and well regulated, progressing steadily towards a distant final state.”

“Going back into the history of a word, very often into Latin, we come back pretty commonly to pictures or models of how things happen or are done.”

“Fact is richer than diction.”

“Sentences are not as such either true or false.”

“There are more ways of outraging speech than contradiction.”