Clergyman's

“From time immemorial, some men supposed to deal in one-valued ‘eternal verities’. We called such men ‘philosophers’ or ‘meta-physicians’. But they seldom realized that all their ‘eternal verities’ consisted only of words, and words which, for the most part, belonged to a primitive language, refleting in its structure the assumed structure of the world of remote antiquity. Besides, they did not realize that these ‘eternal verities’ last only so long as the human nervous system is not altered. Under the influence of these ‘philosophers’, two-valued ‘logic’, and the confusion of orders of abstractions, nearly all of us contracted a firmly rooted predilection for ‘general’ statements – ‘universals’, as they were called – which in most cases inherently involved the semantic one-valued conviction of validity for all ‘time’ to come.”
— Alfred Korzybski

“And at the risk of sounding like Andy Rooney on Sixty Minutes, have you ever wondered why we say fiddle-faddle and not faddle- fiddle? Why is it ping-pong and pitter-patter rather than pong-ping and patter-pitter? Why dribs and drabs, rather than vice versa? Why can’t a kitchen be span and spic? Whence riff-raff, mish-mash, flim-flam, chit-chat, tit for tat, knick-knack, zig-zag, sing-song, ding-dong, King Kong, criss-cross, shilly-shally, see-saw, hee-haw, flip-flop, hippity-hop, tick-tock, tic-tac-toe, eeny-meeny-miney-moe, bric-a-brac, clickety-clack, hickory-dickory-dock, kit and kaboodle, and bibbity-bobbity-boo? The answer is that the vowels for which the tongue is high and in the front always come before the vowels for which the tongue is low and in the back.”
— Steven Pinker

“The language looks rather different when you look at a lot of it at once.”
— John Sinclair