“Clearly, America has no shortage of metaphorical opportunities for the poor.”

“We don't suffer from a shortage of metaphors . . . But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters.”

“This country would not be a land of opportunity, America could not be America, if the people were shackled with government monopolies.”

“Poor writing is lazy, careless writing, an attempt to communicate without adequate preparation or care. It is writing replete with passive construction, limp verbs, leaden clichés, mixed metaphors, dangling participles and misplaced modifiers, and other enemies of clear prose.”

“Suppose the word mountain meant metaphor, and dog, and Bible, and the United States. Clearly, if a word meant everything, it would mean nothing. If, now, the law of contradiction is an arbitrary convention, and if our linguistic theorists choose some other convention, I challenge them to write a book in conformity with their principles. As a matter of fact it will not be hard for them to do so. Nothing more is necessary than to write the word metaphor sixty thousand times: Metaphor metaphor metaphor metaphor…. This means the dog ran up the mountain, for the word metaphor means dog, ran, and mountain. Unfortunately, the sentence “metaphor metaphor metaphor” also means, Next Christmas is Thanksgiving, for the word metaphor has these meanings as well.”

“But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe our ship s sink, or maybe we're grass--our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is still alive. We don't suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters.”