The Elephant…[i]s reckoned the most intellectual animal in the creation after man. […] Nature, always impartial in the distribution of her gifts, has given this bulky quadruped a quick instinct nearly approaching to reason, in compensation for the uncouthness and ill-shapedness of his body.

The dancer titillated her audience with gyrations and suggestive movements.

The country’s first black president, and its first president to reach adulthood after the Vietnam War and Watergate, Mr. Obama seemed like a digital-age leader who could at last dislodge the stalemate between those who clung to the government of the Great Society, on the one hand, and those who disdained the very idea of government, on the other.

Thank you for this very thoughtful present. — Not at all.