I'm guessing half of Americans think a hyphen is as fake as an em dash.

THOMAS BERNHARD

Words ruin one’s thoughts, paper makes them ridiculous, and even while one is still glad to get something ruined and something ridiculous down on paper, one’s memory manages to lose hold of even this ruined and ridiculous something. Paper can turn an enormity into a triviality, an absurdity. If you look at it this way, then whatever appears in the world, by way of the spiritual world so to speak, is always a ruined thing, a ridiculous thing, which means that everything in this world is ridiculous and ruined.

Words were made to demean thought, I would even go so far as to state that words exist in order to abolish thought, and one day they will succeed one hundred percent in so doing. In any case, words bring everything down. Depression derives from words, nothing else.

ELIAS CANETTI

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That the letters of the alphabet still mean something, that they still have their form and weight and the power to manifest something in this destroyed landscape of belief rife with bodies; that they still remain signs rather than having disintegrated like life itself; that they have not grown invisible out of shame, and that every good sentence they are forced to compose still holds potential; that an innocent man does not hang the moment any are crossed out on this page—or could it be that they are even more damned than we are and haven’t a clue?

PHILIP K. DICK

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The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.