I find that people are actually moved by good language. I think that one of the things that is an affliction and has been kind of increasingly an affliction is that we condescend to one another. This has bothered me forever. When Abraham Lincoln - a virtually totally uneducated man - wanted to speak to people, he did it with a degree of refinement that is extraordinary by any standard because he had that kind of respect for the people he was speaking to...To whom are we condescending? How have we let ourselves have such negative assumptions about people in general?
(Balm in Gilead, p.186)
