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

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

Barack Obama's said some very nice things and he says them well. But if you ask me, the reason that we're looking at somebody who is such an inexperienced senator, who has said some very pleasant but not especially sterling or innovative things, the reason that he's considered such a big deal is simply because he's black.

Obama is seen as very, very cool. I think a lot of people find him sexy.

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

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

Prescriptive grammar has spread linguistic insecurity like a plague among English speakers for centuries, numbs us to the aesthetic richness of non-standard speech, and distracts us from attending to genuine issues of linguistic style in writing.