The English Alphabet

…but for the sake of this book let’s consider here the English alphabet: twenty-six purely abstract symbols that in and of themselves mean absolutely nothing, but when put together in the right combinations can introduce into the heasd of readers an infinite cariety of sounds, smells, tastes, feelings, places, people, characters, situations, feelings, ideas. In the righ hands entire universes are born out of just a few sentences and can be just as quickly destroyed. Regimes are upended and then re-created through these groups of little, seemingly harmless, glyphs.

- Chip Kidd, forward, Just My Type: a book about fonts, by Simon Garfield