The round-square may be impossible, but we believe in it because it is impossible. [E.E.] Cummings is a very great expert in all these, so to speak, illegal syntactical devices: his misuse of parts of speech, his use of negative prefixes, his word-coining, his systematic relation of words that grammar and syntax don't permit us to relate - all this makes him a magical bootlegger or moonshiner of language, one who intoxicates us on a clear liquor no government has legalized with its stamp. (Randall Jarrell)

The round-square may be impossible, but we believe in it because it is impossible. [E.E.] Cummings is a very great expert in all these, so to speak, illegal syntactical devices: his misuse of parts of speech, his use of negative prefixes, his word-coining, his systematic relation of words that grammar and syntax don't permit us to relate - all this makes him a magical bootlegger or moonshiner of language, one who intoxicates us on a clear liquor no government has legalized with its stamp.

Randall Jarrell

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What we have of systematic and orderly action and speech ... seems to go back to primeval systematic orderliness as found in magic. The scientific tendency to link everything with everything else, to regard nothing as indifferent, clearly already belonged to the age of magic. If we reach the dependence of human fate on empirical describable conditions, we are much closer in our way of thinking to the men of the magical times that we are commonly apt to suspect.

Otto Neurath

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I have never said that human society ought to be aristocratic, but a great deal more than that. What I have said, and still believe with ever-increasing conviction, is that human society is always, whether it will or no, aristocratic by its very essence, to the extreme that it is a society in the measure that it is aristocratic, and ceases to be such when it ceases to be aristocratic. Of course I am speaking now of society and not of the State.

José Ortega y Gasset

The one affectation I have forced on the publisher ... are my apostrophe-free ellisions. Because I write my scripts to read myself, I dont spell 'don't' with an apostrophe. I spell it 'dont'. We all know the word and it seems foolish to put in an extraneous apostrophe. Punctuation marks are devices we use to make the meaning of sentences clear. There is nothing confusing about a word like 'dont' printed without an apostrophe to indicate an omitted letter.

Andy Rooney

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Lee Kuan Yew