Patriotic societies seem to think that the way to educate school children in a democracy is to stage bigger and better flag-saluting.

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

It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

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.

We should keep [the Panama Canal]. After all, we stole it fair and square.

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.

The United States, a land of immigrants from every corner of the world, has been strengthened and unified because its newcomers have historically chosen ultimately to forgo their native language for the English language. We have all benefited from the sharing of ideas, of cultures and beliefs, made possible by a common language. We have all enriched each other.