In the age of television, image becomes more important than substance.

Notice the difference between what happens when a man says to himself, I have failed three times, and what happens when he says, I am a failure.

Language is a unifying instrument which binds people together. When people speak one language they become as one, they become a society.

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.

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.

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

If everybody is rewarded just for being alive, you get the same sort of effect as you do when you reward every student just for being enrolled. You destroy not only education, you destroy society by giving A's to everyone. This is a philosophical consideration that bothers me very much as I sit in the United States Senate and see the great budget allocations going through.