I tried, but could not find that quote.
I hate to leave you empty handed, so....
Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things they denote.
~ Samuel Johnson
The original root of the word information is the Latin word informare, which means to fashion, shape, or create, to give form to. Information is an idea that has been given a form, such as the spoken or written word. It is a means of representing an image or thought so that it can be communicated from one mind to another rather than worrying about all the information afloat in the world, we must ask ourselves what matters to us, what do we want to know. It's having ideas and learning to deal with issues that is important, not accumulating lots and lots of data.
~ Theordore Roszak
The only chance for victory over the brainwash is the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time. You never get clarity as long as you have these packaged words, as long as a word is used by twenty-five people in twenty-five different ways. That seems to me to be the first fight, if there is going to be any intellect left.
~ Ezra Pound
The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of things.
~ Giambattista Vico
The genius of democracies is seen not only in the great number of new words introduced but even more in the new ideas they express.
~ Alexis de Tocqueville
It makes little difference how many university courses or degrees a person may own. If he cannot use words to move an idea from one point to another, his education is incomplete.
~ Norman Cousins
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
Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else. What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat... where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.
~ Ursula K. LeGuine
Words, when well chosen, have so great a force in them, that a description often gives us more lively ideas than the sight of things themselves.
~ Joseph Addison
When ideas fail, words come in very handy.
~ Johann von Goethe
All words are pegs to hang ideas on.
~ Henry Ward Beecher
We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.
~ John Locke
