George Steiner World Quotations

Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.

We are still waging Peloponnesian wars. Our control of the material world and our positive science have grown fantastically. But our very achievements turn against us, making politics more random and wars more bestial.

Language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is.

Tragedy speaks not of secular dilemmas which may be resolved by rational innovation, but of the unalterable bias toward inhumanity and destruction in the drift of the world.

Women began their inner emancipation by their access to literature, by access to the world through books; an access they could not have socially or politically, or of course economically, in the world at large.

When a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.