Thought and Language

"The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be 'voluntarily' produced and combined...The above mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will." Albert Einstein (from The Creative Process, edited by Brewster Ghiselin, and requoted in Conceptual Blockbusting, by James L. Adams)

"I insist that words are totally absent from my mind when I really think . . . [and] even after reading or hearing a question, every word disappears the moment that I am beginning to think it over . . ." Jacques Hadamard (from The Psychology of Mathematical Invention)

"Thought is born through words. . . Consciousness is reflected in a word as the sun in a drop of water. A word relates to consciousness as a living cell relates to a whole organism, as an atom relates to the universe. A word is a microcosm of human consciousness." Lev Vygotsky (from Thought and Language)

"Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses. . . To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life." Ludwig Wittgenstein (from Philosophical Investigations)

'"We are our language," it is often said; but our real language, our real identity, lies in inner speech, in that ceaseless stream and generation of meaning that constitutes the individual mind.' 'One does not think, at the deepest level, in music or equations, nor, perhaps even for verbal artists, in language either. Schopenhauer and Vygotsky are both great verbal artists, whose thought, it might seem, is inseparable from their words; but both insist it is beyond words: "Thoughts die," Schopenhauer writes, "the moment they are embodied by words." "Words die," Vygotsky writes, "as they bring forth thought." But if thought transcends language, and all representational forms, nonetheless it creates these, and needs these, for its advancement. It did so in human history, and does so in each of us. Thought is not language, or symbolism, or imagery, or music, but without these it may die . . . " Oliver Sacks (from Seeing Voices)

"Debarred from the great highways of knowledge, I was compelled to make the journey across country by unfrequented roads; that was all . . . In the wonderland of Mind I should be as free as another. . . .In a word, literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book friends.They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness." Helen Keller (from The Story of My Life)

A Free Society

"The Congress finds that ... the Nation's proper goals regarding individuals with disabilities are to assure equality of opportunity, full participation, independent living, and economic self-sufficiency for such individuals; and the continuing existence of unfair and unnecessary discrimination and prejudice denies people with disabilities the opportunity to compete on an equal basis and to pursue those opportunities for which our free society is justifiably famous, and costs the United States billions of dollars in unnecessary expenses resulting from dependency and nonproductivity." Sec.2.8 & 9, PL 101-336, "Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990"

"Our country is the world, our countrymen are all mankind." William Lloyd Garrison

"Eventually the civil-rights movement will have contributed infinitely more to the nation than the eradication of racial injustice. It will have enlarged the concept of brotherhood to a vision of total interrelatedness." M.L. King, Jr.

"It is man's vision of a world fit for rational, civilized humanity which leads him to dare and to suffer to build societies free from want and fear." Aung San Suu Kyi

"The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom." G.W.F. Hegel

Effort

"Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration." Thomas Edison

"The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today." Franklin D. Roosevelt

"A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought." Victor Hugo

"A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensively and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others." Percy Bysshe Shelley

"Beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth not images of beauty, but realities." Plato

"Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm." Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time." Mark Twain

Question

Which of the above thinkers had disabilities? Submit your answer.