If language is lost, humanity is lost. If writing is lost, certain kinds of civilization and society are lost, but many other kinds remain - and there is no reason to think that those alternatives are inferior.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the critical role of language and writing in preserving humanity and civilization.
Robert Bringhurst's quote highlights the importance of language and writing as fundamental to human civilization. It suggests that while the loss of language might signify a profound loss for humanity itself, the loss of writing would only affect certain forms of society and culture, implying that alternative societies could still thrive without it. This perspective invites reflection on the resilience of human experience and the varied forms civilization can take, even in the face of loss.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of preserving indigenous languages.
Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form, and thus with an independent existence. Its heartwood is calligraphy - the dance, on a tiny stage, of the living, speaking hand - and its roots reach into living soil, though its branches may be hung each year with new machines. So long as the root lives, typography remains a source of true delight, true knowledge, true surprise.
Typography exists to honor content.
In a world rife with unsolicited messages, typography must often draw attention to itself before it will be read. Yet in order to be read, it must relinquish the attention it has drawn. Typography with anything to say therefore aspires to a kind of statuesque transparency. It's other traditional goal is durability: not immunity to change, but a clear superiority to fashion. Typography at its best is a visual form of language linking timelessness and time.
When you think intensely and beautifully, something happens. That something is called poetry. If you think that way and speak at the same time, poetry gets in your mouth. If people hear you, it gets in their ears. If you think that way and write at the same time, then poetry gets written. But poetry exists in any case. The question is only: are you going to take part, and if so, how?
Poetry, I'm often told, is something made of words. I think it really goes the other way around: words are made of poetry.
The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.
Truth is the agreement of our ideas with the ideas of God.
The first woman was created from the rib of a man. She was not made from his head to top him, nor from his feet to be trampled on by him, but out of his side to be equal to him.
The Americans never use the word peasant, because they have no idea of the class which that term denotes; the ignorance of more remote ages, the simplicity of rural life, and the rusticity of the villager have not been preserved among them; and they are alike unacquainted with the virtues, the vices, the coarse habits, and the simple graces of an early stage of civilization.
It is indeed a singular thing that people wish to pass laws to nullify the disagreeable consequences that the law of responsibility entails. Will they never realize that they do not eliminate these consequences but merely pass them along to other people? The result is one injustice the more and one moral the less.
Because I have work to care about, it is possible that I may be less difficult to get along with than other women when the double chins start to form.
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