I think even in today's America, there's a sense that there's something vaguely sexy about cigarettes.

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.

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.

They are moved less by the direct presence of their gods than by the more indirect feeling that they would somehow like their gods to be present.

It's as if cats live in a seperate universe that takes up the same space as ours, but is full of facinating things like mice or sparrows or special TV programs that we can't see.

And it is very sexy as well: somebody says I'm taking you on a surprise date, you don't know where you are going and you can't see and then you put your hand out and there is a tiger. Amazing.

Take all the robes of all the good judges that have ever lived on the face of the earth, and they would not be large enough to cover the iniquity of one corrupt judge.

But I think Hillary Clinton is one of the most amazing women of this time.

Being out in nature inspires me as a writer.

Leaders attract potential leaders.

We infer the spirit of the nation in great measure from the language, which is a sort of monument, to which each forcible individual in a course of many hundred years has contributed a stone.

Marshall Rosenberg has a genius for developing and teaching practical skills urgently needed for a less violent, more caring world.

God is cruel and not cruel. He is all being and not being at the same time. Hence He is all contradictions. Nature also is nothing but a mass of contradictions.