People have been warning us that language was going to the dogs ever since Latin started turning into French. Yet the dogs in question never seem to emerge yelping on the horizon.

Every third person in the world is a drama queen. And crying 'victim,' especially when you're not really a victim in any real way, feels good. It feels good to cry victim if you're not one.

Texting is very loose in its structure. No one thinks about capital letters or punctuation when one texts, but then again, do you think about those things when you talk?

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

English, however, is kinky. It has a predilection for dressing up like Welsh on lonely nights.

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.

A person you excuse from any genuine challenge is a person you do not truly respect.

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

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

Frankly, Barack Obama is a standard issue leftist that you would expect of somebody with his particular experience, and he doesn't exactly hide it.

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

I never told anyone this before but my Layla is my rain.

The effort to blur the lines between Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib reflects a deep misunderstanding about the different legal regimes that apply to Iraq and the war against al Qaeda.

One God, one law, one element, And one far-off divine event, To which the whole creation moves.

Goals give purpose. Purpose gives faith. Faith gives courage. Courage gives enthusiasm. Enthusiasm gives energy. Energy gives life. Life lifts you over the bar.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with returning to the house you grew up in every now and again. It's good for the soul.

Science and education, when devoid of a social conscience or environmental and human concern, are meaningless.

I had three jobs in college. The best day of my life was when I paid off my student loans, on my own.

Humility is the secret of the wise.

I feel that within the Mormon culture there is a tremendous amount of fear - of women's voices, of questioning of authority, and ultimately of our own creativity.

I knew that this job would be too much for me.