Loving your language means a command of its vocabulary beyond the level of the everyday.

I don't think that we really know a whole lot about Barack Obama at all that you would really call distinctive.

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.

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

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.

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

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