The next time you see a 16-color, blind-embossed, gold-stamped, die-cut, elaborately folded and bound job, printed on handmade paper, see if it isn't a mediocre idea trying to pass for something else. — Milton Glaser
What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind. — Wendell Phillips
Writing, printing, and the Internet give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture. — Jane Jacobs
Standardization, instead of individualization. Cheap books, instead of private press editions. Active literature, instead of passive leather bindings. — Jan Tschichold
If all else fails, there's always print or web zines. — Rudy Rucker
The paper burns, but the words fly away. — Rabbi Akiva
I'm very much a word person, so that's why typography for me is the obvious extension. It just makes my words visible. — Erik Spiekermann
Prints mimic what we are as humans: we are all the same and yet every one is different. I think there's a spiritual power in repetition, a devotional quality, like saying rosaries. — Kiki Smith
Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare. — Guy de Maupassant
Its focus wasn't on the written word but how the word was written. — Neville Brody
Text is just ink on a page until a reader comes along and gives it life. — Louise Rosenblatt
A book calls for pen, ink, and a writing desk; today the rule is that pen, ink, and a writing desk call for a book. — Friedrich Nietzsche
Written Word Quotes
I have written a song that says: If you ever lose someone dear to you, never say the words, "They're gone," and they'll come back. — Prince
I have a fundamental belief in the Bible as the Word of God, written by those who were inspired. I study the Bible daily. — Isaac Newton
A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart, and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words.
If we once get above our Bibles and cease making the written Word of God our sole rule both as to faith and practice, we shall soon lie open to all manner of delusion and be in great danger of making shipwreck of faith and a good conscience. — George Whitefield
Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: 'Ye must have faith.' — Max Planck
If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on. — Terence McKenna
You will continue to suffer if you have an emotional reaction to everything that is said to you. True power is sitting back and observing everything with logic. If words control your that means everyone can control you. Breathe and allow things to pass.
The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenements halls and whispered in the sounds of silence. — Paul Simon
Flowers have spoken to me more than I can tell in written words. They are the hieroglyphics of angels, loved by all men for the beauty of their character, though few can decipher even fragments of their meaning. — Lydia M. Child
The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible. — Vladimir Nabokov
I have a fundamental belief in the Bible as the Word of God, written by men who were inspired. I study the Bible daily. Opposition to godliness is atheism in profession and idolatry in practice. Atheism is so senseless and odious to mankind that it never had many professors. — Isaac Newton
No printed word, nor spoken plea can teach young minds what they should be. Not all the books on all the shelves - but what the teachers are themselves. — Rudyard Kipling
A beautiful deleveraging balances the three options. In other words, there is a certain amount of austerity, there is a certain amount of debt restructuring, and there is a certain amount of printing of money. When done in the right mix, it isn't dramatic. — Ray Dalio
Never before had I known the sudden quiver of understanding that travels from word to brain to heart, the way a new language can move, coil, swim into life under the eyes, the almost savage leap of comprehension, the instantaneous, joyful release of meaning, the way the words shed their printed bodies in a flash of heat and light. — Elizabeth Kostova
Be sure to taste your words before you spit them out.
Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words. — Betty Smith
The whole problem with news on television comes down to this: all the words uttered in an hour of news coverage could be printed on a page of a newspaper. And the world cannot be understood in one page. — Sayings
On the pavement
of my trampled soul
the steps of madmen
weave the prints of rude crude words. — Vladimir Mayakovsky
We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images. — John Gardner
Open a book this minute and start reading. Don’t move until you’ve reached page fifty. Until you’ve buried your thoughts in print. Cover yourself with words. Wash yourself away. Dissolve. — Carol Shields
Paintings may not have nearly the power to convert people that the printed or spoken word has, but each man has his part to play in the human and divine drama - some persons just a few lines, others whole pages. To refuse to play one's role at all is not the answer. It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness. — William Kurelek
Amid chaos of images, we value coherence. We believe in the printed word. And we believe in clarity. And we believe in immaculate syntax. And in the beauty of the English language. — William Shawn
The full impact of printing did not become possible until the adoption of the Bill of Rights in the United States with its guarantee of freedom of the press. A guarantee of freedom of the press in print was intended to further sanctify the printed word and to provide a rigid bulwark for the shelter of vested interests. — Harold Innis
It is a melancholy illusion of those who write books and articles that the printed word survives. Alas, it rarely does. — Eric Hobsbawm
The problem is this: in order to make money- lots of money- we don't need flawless literary masterpieces. What we need is mediocre rubbish, trash suitable for mass consumption. More and more, bigger and bigger blockbusters of less and less significance. What counts is the paper we sell, not the words that are printed on it. — Walter Moers
Imagine what our culture would be like if Americans sold ideas, words, and books with the same creativity we use to sell designer jeans, shampoo, and rock stars. Why, we might end up with people whos attention span for the printed word is longer than the time it takes to read a T-shirt. — Jim Trelease
The time is long overdue for a massive flooding of the earth with the Book of Mormon for the many reasons which the Lord has given. In this age of electronic media and mass distribution of the printed word, God will hold us accountable if we do not now move the Book of Mormon in a monumental way. — Ezra Taft Benson
Friendship is a word, the very sight of which in print makes the heart warm. — Augustine Birrell
I am full of admiration for the technologists who have developed all sorts of gadgets for the purpose of improving communications. However, I believe that all these fascinating machines are complementary to, and not substitutes for, books and the printed word. — Prince Philip
The governments alone are responsible for the spread of the superstitious awe with which the common man looks upon every bit of paper upon which the treasury or agencies which it controls have printed the magical words legal tender. — Ludwig von Mises
My work is more driven by the creative word. It's immersed in other writing and printed work, rather than drawn so much from life or past experience. — Raymond Pettibon
It is permissible with certain precautions to speak in print of coitus, but it is not permissible to employ the monosyllabic synonym for this word. — Bertrand Russell
The words that bore the deathless verse of Homer from bard to a group of fascinated hearers, and with whose fading sounds the poems passed beyond recall, are fixed on the printed page in a hundred tongues. They carry to a million eyes what once could reach but a hundred ears. — Nicholas Murray Butler
Ideals jump across the hierarchies of the printed word. — Dennis Potter
I love the description of Gothic churches before the printed word, that they were the bibles of the poor. — John McGahern
America is the only country ever founded on the printed word. — Marshall McLuhan
We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves. — George Eliot
We are all imprisoned by the dictionary. We choose out of that vast, paper-walled prison our convicts, the little black printed words, when in truth we need fresh sounds to utter, new enfranchised noises which would produce a new effect. — Mervyn Peake
If the Holy Bible was printed as an Ace Double it would be cut down to two 20,000-word halves with the Old Testament retitled as ‘Master of Chaos’ and the New Testament as ‘The Thing With Three Souls. — Terry Carr
His eyes beheld beauty not in reality but in the printed word. Standing in the waiting-room, he realized that in his life he had accepted secondary experience -- the experience of reading someone else's thoughts -- over real life. — Ian Rankin
The words printed here are concepts. You must go through the experiences. — Frederick (Carl) Frieseke
Opinionated writing is always the most difficult... simply because it involves retaining in the cold morning-after crystal of the printed word the burning flow of molten feeling. — Gavin Lyall
I come alive when I have assisted in bringing out the printed word on the stage, you know, and I enjoy directing plays. It's a tactile process, theatre, unlike a number of other forms of the creative work. — Wole Soyinka
It has been demonstrated that freemason - in an operative context - is a contraction of 'freestone mason'....The earliest printed use so far traced comes in The Pilgrimage of Perfection - usually attributed to William Bonde - printed in 1536 by Wynkyn de Worde. — John Hamill
Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination to-day, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They seem utterly real. They come, we imagine, directly to us without human meddling, and they are the most effortless food for the mind conceivable. — Walter Lippmann
How can I tell Bob that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he know I am justifying my life, my keen emotions, my feeling, by turning it into print? — Sylvia Plath
The successful Accelerated Reader is able to read larger than normal blocks or bites of the printed page with each eye stop. He has accepted, without reservation, the philosophy that the most important benefit of reading is the gaining of information, ideas, mental picture and entertainment-not the fretting over words. He has come to the realization that words in and of themselves are for the most part insignificant. — Wade E. Cutler
Surrealism will usher you into death, which is a secret society. It will glove your hand, burying therein the profound M with which the word Memory begins. Do not forget to make proper arrangements for your last will and testament: speaking personally, I ask that I be taken to the cemetery in a moving van. May my friends destroy every last copy of the printing of the Speech concerning the Modicum of Reality. — Andre Breton
The summer of 1991, I took $2,000 of my savings and a desktop program, and I asked my friends to write 800 words about something they cared about. I got eight or nine articles and put them together. It was no frills, black and white, no graphics. I printed them out and just dumped piles around D.C. — Eric Liu
Use of the word; the word itself was not printed. — Robert Vaughan
We printed all the words out because otherwise nobody would be able to understand them. — Paul Kantner
Words, once they are printed, have a life of their own. — Carol Burnett
The only reason the word "brand" gets a little tiresome is that something that is complex and wonderful and deep begins to sound like a can of tomato soup. I recoil at that, but I'm used to it. I know what it means: It means that The New Yorker is not merely the magazine that comes out in print once a week. It's the Web site, it's the festival, it's our mobile application - all these things - and what they stand for and what they mean. — David Remnick
As somebody who's kind of a technophile, I'm interested in how traditional and digital publishing connect. Maybe ten years ago they were seen as antagonists, but now they complement each other. There's data that shows digital sales actually drive print sales. And even the ways in which pictures and words, text and image, interact - we're seeing these books that are very hard to categorize. All of that is very exciting to me. — Gene Luen Yang
I am addicted to the printed word, and my idea of a good time is a good book. — Julianne Malveaux
Nothing translates worse than comedy into the printed word. — Janeane Garofalo
One of the interesting things I discovered, talking about your grandmother, is I did a search of my uses of the word "elderly" in my copy over the years, and you will not be surprised to hear that the older I got the less often I used the word elderly in print. — Anna Quindlen
In Conclusion
Which quotation resonated with you best? Did you enjoy our collection of printed word quotes? Or may be you have a slogan about printed word to suggest. Let us know using our contact form.
Citation
Feel free to cite and use any of the quotes in this collection of printed word quotations. For popular citation styles(APA, Chicago, MLA), please use this citation page.