The United States is enriched by many cultures, and united by a single common language.

Few people...have had much training in listening. The training of most oververbalized professional intellectuals is in the opposite direction. Living in a competitive culture, most of us are most of the time chiefly concerned with getting our own views across, and we tend to find other people's speeches a tedious interruption of the flow of our own ideas.

Learning to write is learning to think. You don't know anything clearly unless you can state it in writing.

Those terrifying verbal jungles called laws are simply such directives, accumulated, codified, and systematized through the centuries.

English is the key to full participation in the opportunities of American life.

It is the individual who knows how little they know about themselves who stands the most reasonable chance of finding out something about themselves before they die.

The language we share is at the core of our identity as citizens, and our ticket to full participation in American political life. We can speak any language we want at the dinner table, but English is the language of public discourse, or the marketplace and of the voting booth.