We are a big country, with lots of advantages and ...

I perfectly understood President Obama's attitude throughout the French presidential campaign. He had no reason to distance himself from Nicolas Sarkozy. It's the basic solidarity that leaders who worked together owe to each other.

An education program is, by definition, a societal program. Work should be done at school, rather than at home.

Each country has a soul, and France's soul is equality.

Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.

Every age has its own poetry in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

I saw no African people in the printed and illustrated Sunday school lessons. I began to suspect at this early age that someone had distorted the image of my people. My long search for the true history of African people the world over began.

1 month ago the American people stopped to remember the third anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war. We thought first and foremost of the selflessness, patriotism and heroism by our troops, our National Guard and Reserves.

Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man's starving!

For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.

I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.