These jargon quotes will inspire you. Jargon special words or expressions that are used by a particular profession or group and are difficult for others to understand.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging jargon quotes, jargon sayings, and jargon proverbs.
Famous Jargon Quotes
- “Incomprehensible jargon is the hallmark of a profession.” ~ Kingman Brewster, Jr.
- “Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.” ~ George Orwell
- “Jargon is the verbal sleight of hand that makes the old hat seem newly fashionable; it gives an air of novelty and specious profundity to ideas that, if stated directly, would seem superficial, stale, frivolous, or false. The line between serious and spurious scholarship is an easy one to blur, with jargon on your side.” ~ David Lehman
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“I think we invent jargon because it saves times talking to one another.” ~ John M. Smith
- “Words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean.” ~ Theodor Adorno
- “Psychobabble is… a set of repetitive verbal formalities that kills off the very spontaneity, candor, and understanding it pretends to promote. It’s an idiom that reduces psychological insight to a collection of standardized observations, that provides a frozen lexicon to deal with an infinite variety of problems.” ~ Richard Rosen
- “Our business is infested with idiots who try to impress by using pretentious jargon.” ~ David Ogilvy
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“Jargon seems to be the place where the right brain and the left brain meet.” ~ Wendy Kaminer
- “Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon.” ~ Edsger Dijkstra
- “I prefer the honest jargon of reality to the outright lies of books.” ~ Jean Rostand
- “Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes over this task.” ~ Theodor Adorno
- “You can’t write about people out of textbooks, and you can’t use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand, and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.” ~ Katherine Anne Porter
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“Ours is the age of substitutes: Instead of language we have jargon; instead of principles, slogans; and instead of genuine ideas, bright suggestions.” ~ Eric Bentley
- “Art is to be admired rather than explained. The jargon of these sculptors is beyond me. I do not precisely know why I admire a green granite, female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner.” ~ Ezra Pound
- “I dislike literary jargon and never use it. Criticism has only one function and that is to help readers read and understand literature. It is not a science, it is an aid to art.” ~ Anne Stevenson
- “Yet Aristotle’s excellence of substance, so far from being associated with the grand style, is associated with something that at times comes perilously near jargon.” ~ Irving Babbitt
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“Ancient philosophy proposed to mankind an art of living. By contrast, modern philosophy appears above all as the construction of a technical jargon reserved for specialists.” ~ Pierre Hadot
- “What is or is not the jargon is determined by whether the word is written in an intonation which places it transcendently in opposition to its own meaning; by whether the individual words are loaded at the expense of the sentence, its propositional force, and the thought content.” ~ Theodor Adorno
- “Never let me hear that foolish word again.” ~ Honore Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau
- “I was instructed long ago by a wise editor, “If you understand something you can explain it so that almost anyone can understand it. If you don’t, you won’t be able to understand your own explanation.” That is why 90% of academic film theory is bullshit. Jargon is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” ~ Roger Ebert
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“Clutter is the disease of American writing.” ~ William Zinsser
- “You know, whenever women make imaginary female kingdoms in literature, they are always very permissive, to use the jargon word, and easy and generous and self-indulgent, like the relationships between women when there are no men around. They make each other presents, and they have little feasts, and nobody punishes anyone else. This is the female way of going along when there are no men about or when men are not in the ascendant.” ~ Doris Lessing
- “Politics in the United States consists of the struggle between those whose change has been arrested by success or failure, on one side, and those who are still engaged in changing themselves, on the other. Agitators of arrested metamorphosis versus agitators of continued metamorphosis. The former have the advantage of numbers (since most people accept themselves as successes or failures quite early), the latter of vitality and visibility (since self-transformation, though it begins from within, with ideology, religion, drugs, tends to express itself publicly through costume and jargon).” ~ Harold Rosenberg
- “In fast-moving, progress-conscious America, the consumer expects to be dizzied by progress. If he could completely understand advertising jargon he would be badly disappointed. The half-intelligibility which we expect, or even hope, to find in the latest product language personally reassures each of us that progress is being made: that the pace exceeds our ability to follow.” ~ Daniel J. Boorstin
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“Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills, and meaningless jargon.” ~ William Zinsser
- “It is likewise to be observed that this society hath a peculiar chant and jargon of their own, that no other mortal can understand, and wherein all their laws are written, which they take special care to multiply.” ~ Jonathan Swift
- “Jargon: any technical language we do not understand.” ~ Mason Cooley
- “The General Theory was not truly revolutionary at all but merely old and oft-refuted mercantilist and inflationist fallacies dressed up in shiny new garb, replete with newly constructed and largely incomprehensible jargon.” ~ Murray Rothbard
- “Jargon is part ceremonial robe, part false beard.” ~ Mason Cooley
- “While wading through the whimsies, the puerilities, and unintelligible jargon of this work [Plato’s Republic], I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this?” ~ Thomas Jefferson
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“People seem to get caught up in jargon like they get caught up in ashrams and power structures and they never become free. They become masters of jargon and power structures.” ~ Frederick Lenz
- “Never use jargon words like ‘reconceptualize’, ‘demassification’, ‘attitudinally’, ‘judgmentally’. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.” ~ David Ogilvy
- “[Math] curriculum is obsessed with jargon and nomenclature seemingly for no other purpose than to provide teachers with something to test the students on.” ~ Paul Lockhart
- “Surrendering to jargon is a sign of journalism’s dismal lack of self-confidence in the optimized age of content-management systems.” ~ George Packer
- “There is a certain jargon, which, in French, I should call un Persiflage d’Affaires, that a foreign Minister ought to be perfectlymaster of, and may be used very advantageously at great entertainments, in mixed companies, and in all occasions where he must speak, and should say nothing. Well turned and well spoken, it seems to mean something, though in truth it means nothing. It is a kind of political badinage, which prevents or removes a thousand difficulties, to which a foreign Minister is exposed in mixed conversations.” ~ Lord Chesterfield , Political jargon quotes
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“We have been stuffed full of praise for mediocrity and had our foibles diagnosed away with hyphenated jargon and pop psychology.” ~ Kevin DeYoung
- “Most people assume that physician language is akin to technical, non-understandable jargon. It does not have to be that way. Doctors do not perform witchcraft. They simply interpret what they are told and what tests reveal. They diagnose and prescribe treatment. Our responsibility is to help doctors know what is going on in our bodies and to insist on clear, precise, understandable language in response.” ~ Ann Richards
- “Sphere Music – Some sounds seem to reverberate along the plain, and then settle to earth again like dust; such are Noise, Discord, Jargon. But such only as spring heavenward, and I may catch from steeples and hilltops in their upward course, which are the more refined parts of the former, are the true sphere music – pure, unmixed music – in which no wail mingles.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
- “New York cops are very specific in terms of the way they talk and the way they handle themselves. All these cliches that, as an Englishman, I thought were from a bygone era or were a bit of poetic license with cop shows – the more you hang out with them, the more you realize how real that jargon is.” ~ Theo James
- “I suggest to young professors that their first work should be written in a jargon only to be understood by the erudite few. With that behind them, they can ever after say what they have to say in a language ‘understand of the people.'” ~ Bertrand Russell
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“I don’t know that I could do a procedural legal drama and spend all my time in a courtroom talking legal jargon that I don’t necessarily understand.” ~ Lucas Till
- “Literature is an aspect of story and story is all that exists to make sense of reality. War is a story. Now you begin to see how powerful story is because it informs our worldview and our every action, our every justification is a story. So how can story not be truly transformative? I’ve seen it happen in real ways, not in sentimental ways or in the jargon of New Age liberal ideology.” ~ Chris Abani
- “A man who says that men are machines may be a great scientist. A man who says he is a machine is ‘depersonalized’ in psychiatric jargon.” ~ R. D. Laing
- “The world of the 90s and beyond will belong to managers or those who make the numbers dance, as we used to say, or those who are conversant with all the business jargon we used to sound smart. The world will belong to passionate, driven leaders — people who not only have an enormous amount of energy but who can energize those whom they lead.” ~ John Welch
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“Where jargon turns living issues into abstractions, and where jargon ends by competing with jargon, people don’t have causes. They only have enemies.” ~ V. S. Naipaul
- “To me the gospel is not a great mass of theological jargon. It is a simple and beautiful and logical thing, with one quiet truth following another in orderly sequence. I do not fret over the mysteries. I do not worry whether the heavenly gates swing or slide. I am only concerned that they open.” ~ Gordon B. Hinckley
- “If an opinion can eventually go to the determination of a practical belief, it, in so far, becomes itself a practical belief; and every proposition that is not pure metaphysical jargon and chatter must have some possible bearing upon practice.” ~ Charles Sanders Peirce
- “All this [Paul’s writing] is nothing better than the jargon of a conjurer who picks up phrases he does not understand to confound the credulous people who come to have their fortune told. Age of Reason” ~ Thomas Paine
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“The clear and simple words of common usage are always better than those of erudition. The jargon of the philosophers not seldom conceals an absence of thought.” ~ Andre Maurois
- “A jargon form’d from the lost language, wit, Confounded in that Babel of the pit; Form’d by diseased conceptions, weak and wild, Sick lust of souls, and an abortive child; Born between whores and fops, by lewd compacts, Before the play, or else between the acts; Nor wonder, if from such polluted minds Should spring such short and transitory kinds.” ~ Jonathan Swift
- “Literary theory has become a parody of science, generating its own arcane jargon. In the process, tragically, it discourages love of literature for its own sake.” ~ Nancy Pearcey
- “The jargon of authenticity … is a trademark of socialized chosenness, … sub-language as superior language.” ~ Theodor Adorno
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“I don’t get into ‘becauses.’ When you come into a studio you see a number of works. My habit is to go to the one I like most. If you start to say, ‘because,’ you get into art jargon.” ~ Clement Greenberg
- “We do not need French post-structuralism, whose pedantic jargon, clumsy convolutions, and prissy abstractions have spread throughout academe and the arts and are now blighting the most promising minds of the next generation. This is a major crisis if there ever was one, and every sensible person must help bring it to an end.” ~ Camille Paglia
- “It is curious how an age of public self-revelation, and of the use of psychological jargon, should also be an age when self-examination is rarely practiced.” ~ Anthony Daniels
- “Creationists have also changed their name … to intelligent design theorists who study ‘irreducible complexity’ and the ‘abrupt appearance’ of life-yet more jargon for ‘God did it.’ … Notice that they have no interest in replacing evolution with native American creation myths or including the Code of Hammurabi alongside the posting of the Ten Commandments in public schools.” ~ Michael Shermer
- “[M]an has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily “true” or “false,” but as “academic” or “practical,” “outworn” or “contemporary,” “conventional” or “ruthless.” Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong or stark or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.” ~ C. S. Lewis
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“What’s a’ your jargon o’ your schools, Your Latin names for horns and stools; If honest nature made you fools.” ~ Robert Burns
- “Hume develops his arguments by a series of models. He doesn’t call them models in the pretentious way in which we envelope, very often, pure banalities in this jargon” ~ Lionel Robbins, Baron Robbins
- “The attempt of Lavoisier to reform chemical nomenclature is premature. One single experiment may destroy the whole filiation of his terms; and his string of sulphates, sulphites, and sulphures, may have served no end than to have retarded the progress of science by a jargon, from the confusion of which time will be requisite to extricate us.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
- “In the old days, words like sin and Satan had a moral certitude. Today, they’re replaced with self-help jargon, words like dysfunction and antisocial behavior, discouraging any responsibility for one’s actions.” ~ Don Henley
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“I despise the phony, fancy-pants rhetoric of professors aping jargon-filled European locutions – which have blighted academic film criticism for over 30 years.” ~ Camille Paglia
- “In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. It is easier to acquire wealth and power by this combination than by deserving them and to effect this, they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer for their purposes.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
- “This is revolution in reaction, as well as in radicalism, and Toryism speaking a jargon of law and order may often be a graver menace to liberty than radicalism bellowing the empty phrases of the soapbox demagogue.” ~ Frank I. Cobb
- “Well, Page, I do wish the Devil had old Cooke, for I am sure I never was so tired of an old dull scoundrel in my life … But the old-fellows say we must read to gain knowledge, and gain knowledge to make us happy and be admired. Mere jargon! Is there any such thing as happiness in this world? No.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
