Language Is Courage

"The real language problem: how to bend it shape it, how to let it be our freedom, how to repossess its poisoned wells, how to master the river of words of time of blood: about all that you haven’t got a clue. How hard that struggle, how inevitable the defeat. Nobody’s going to elect me to anything. No power-base, no constituency: just the battle with the words...Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true."

~ Salmon Rushdie