Top 14 Quotes & Sayings by John H. McWhorter

Politics is work. Hiphop is music. The idea that hiphop, because it makes the body feel good to move to it and it makes the soul feel good to hear out angry young black men, can be transmuted into changing the world is narcotic but nonsensical. Wherever hiphop is ever "going," we can be sure it will not be in a constructive direction, anymore than fashions in the color of cars. And it shouldn't "concern" us in the least.

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.

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

I think even in today's America, there's a sense that there's something vaguely sexy about cigarettes.

Obama is seen as very, very cool. I think a lot of people find him sexy.

Prescriptive grammar has spread linguistic insecurity like a plague among English speakers for centuries, numbs us to the aesthetic richness of non-standard speech, and distracts us from attending to genuine issues of linguistic style in writing.

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.

I don't think that we really know a whole lot about Barack Obama at all that you would really call distinctive.

The black conservative is responsible for making people question an idea that racism must be extinct before black people can overcome. Understanding that our goal is to thrive despite racism rather than fetishizing it is, in fact, the central ideological plank of people deemed "black conservatives." This is a coherent position, but that can be hard to perceive, given the way that race has been discussed in our land over the past 40 years or so.

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

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

Barack Obama's said some very nice things and he says them well. But if you ask me, the reason that we're looking at somebody who is such an inexperienced senator, who has said some very pleasant but not especially sterling or innovative things, the reason that he's considered such a big deal is simply because he's black.

I think what Obama does more than his amazing speaking ability is he's able to connect with voters. And it's that hope that he brings out in American citizens that we are all hungry for, that people get excited about Sen. Obama.