Frankly, Barack Obama is a standard issue leftist that you would expect of somebody with his particular experience, and he doesn't exactly hide it.

Every third person in the world is a drama queen. And crying 'victim,' especially when you're not really a victim in any real way, feels good. It feels good to cry victim if you're not one.

People have been warning us that language was going to the dogs ever since Latin started turning into French. Yet the dogs in question never seem to emerge yelping on the horizon.

Texting is very loose in its structure. No one thinks about capital letters or punctuation when one texts, but then again, do you think about those things when you talk?

If you took away the color of Barack Obama's skin, nobody right now would be paying him any attention.

English, however, is kinky. It has a predilection for dressing up like Welsh on lonely nights.

Ebonics - or black English, as I prefer to call it - is one of a great many dialects of English. And so English comes in a great many varieties, and black English is one of them.

A person you excuse from any genuine challenge is a person you do not truly respect.

No longer can we measure compassion by how much we spend on poverty but how many people we help to lift out of poverty.

People think of black English as ungrammatical, but it bears the same relationship to standard English as contemporary Hebrew does to ancient Hebrew.

We must neither behave as children by resisting honesty, nor allow ourselves to be treated as children by having honesty withheld.

If you can't get everyone on your side, make sure they're right behind you.

Be sweet, be good, and honest always.

To change your mind under the direction of the wisdom of the heart is a brush stroke on the masterpiece you are delivering to the world.

To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression. I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.

There's no such thing as an easy anything.

People are much more important than superficial environments.

Light flared through every limb, a force far too great to be contained in any human frame; but for that moment she was the Great Mother, giving birth to the world.

Pride dwells in the thought; the tongue can have but a very little share in it.

I am Jewish and proud of this culturally and ethnically - the ways in which I was born this way and am happy with whom I am.

I don't like to direct myself.