If I am selling to you, I speak your language. If I am buying, dann müssen sie Deutsch sprechen.
— Willy Brandt
Most Powerful Foreign Languages quotations
My neighbor has two dogs. One of them says to the other, "Woof!" The other replies, "Moo!" The dog is perplexed. "Moo? Why did you say 'Moo'?" The other dog says, "I'm trying to learn a foreign language."

Knowledge of languages is the doorway to wisdom.

Do you know what a foreign accent is? It's a sign of bravery.
I speak the truth but I guess that's a foreign language to ya'll!
I believe the United States should allow all foreigners in this country, provided they can speak our native language... Apache.

You can never understand one language until you understand at least two.
More than ever, I feel that the human race is one.
There are differences of colour, language, culture and opportunities, but people's feelings and reactions are alike. People flee wars to escape death, they migrate to improve their fortunes, they build new lives in foreign lands, they adapt to extreme hardship….
Independent India's leaders will neither use a foreign language nor rule from a remote place.

I suggest that US foreign policy can still be defined as "kiss my ass or I'll kick your head in." But of course it doesn't put it like that. It talks of "low intensity conflict..." What all this adds up to is a disease at the very centre of language, so that language becomes a permanent masquerade, a tapestry of lies.
Language is the only thing worth knowing even poorly.
Happiness is the most natural thing in the world when you have it, and the slowest, strangest, most impossible thing when you don't. It's like learning a foreign language: You can think about the words all you want, but you'll never be able to speak it until you suck up your courage and say them out loud.

[When her daughter suggested the President refer in his conversation with foreign dignitaries about lawn care to 'fertilizer' instead of to 'manure':] But remember, it took me almost thirty years to get him to call it manure.
I say I'm in love with her. What does that mean? It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. LIke genius she is ignorant of what she does.
The language of the law must not be foreign to the ears of those who are to obey it.

Symptoms are the body's mother tongue; signs are in a foreign language.
Language is not a genetic gift, it is a social gift.
Learning a new language is becoming a member of the club -the community of speakers of that language.
Those who know nothing of foreign languages, knows nothing of their own.

Writing in a foreign language - has brought me to the cries of the women silently rebelling in my youth, to my own true origins.
No one would starve in independent India.
Its grain would not be exported. Cloth would not be imported by it. Its leaders would not use a foreign language and finding justice in it would be neither costly nor difficult.
If only I could visit you as a foreigner goes into a new country, learn the language of you, wander past all borders into every private and secret place, I would stay forever. I would become a citizen of you.

Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language.
The soul inside me is the last foreign language I'm learning.
Americans who travel abroad for the first time are often shocked to discover that, despite all the progress that has been made in the last 30 years, many foreign people still speak in foreign languages

Columbia University, where I went to study in 1993, insisted its undergraduates learn a foreign language, so I discovered French.
Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.
A common creation demands a common sacrifice, and perhaps not the least potent argument in favour of a constructed international language is the fact that it is equally foreign, or apparently so, to the traditions of all nationalities.

Math and science fields are not the only areas where we see the United States lagging behind. Less than 1 percent of American high school students study the critical foreign languages of Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Russian, combined.
He who does not know foreign languages does not know anything about his own.
Basketball, in America, is like a culture.
It is like a foreigner learning a new language. It is difficult to learn foreign languages and it will also be difficult for me to learn the culture for basketball here.

English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner.
Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman's apparel is clearly asking to be mangled.
Speak a new language so that the world will be a new world.
If you do not know his language, you will never understand a foreigner's silence.
The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.
Page 61: No matter where I go in the world, although I can't speak any foreign language, I don't feel out of place. I think of earth as my home. If everyone thought this way, people might notice just how foolish international friction is and the would be put an end to it.