What happened on September 11 compels us to focus on who we are as Americans, what we stand for, what really matters in our lives - family, friends, faith and freedom.
Workers have kept faith in American institutions. Most of the conflicts, which have occurred have been when labor's right to live has been challenged and denied.
When I arrived in Laos and found young Americans living there, out of free choice, I was surprised. After only a week, I began to have a sense of the appeal of the country and its people - along with despair about its future.
If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land.
This gets back to the fundamental lesson of political survival that Bill Clinton taught me, which is if you make it about the American people's lives instead of your life, you're going to be okay.
President Reagan was concerned - deeply concerned, emotionally concerned - with the loss of life of any American, but especially with the lives of military soldiers, Marines, navy.
Life is not living in the suburbs with a white picket fence. That's not life. Somehow our American culture has made it out that that's what life needs to be - and that if it's not that, it's all screwed up. It's not.
Americans believe that they still live in the land of opportunity - the country that offers the greatest chance of economic advancement. But this is no longer the case.
There is a barbarism in the American soul, and we must protect some of it by law. To root it out is to endanger our lives on the one hand, and our liberty on the other.
Instead of kids just hearing about beads and baskets and fringe, and about what 'was' and 'were,' we present Native American culture as a living contemporary culture.
A large majority of Americans believe that corporations exert too much influence on our daily lives and our political process.
I remember how, when I lived in Paris, there was a McDonald's, and I'd always see Americans eating there and think, 'Why do they come all the way to Paris and eat at McDonald's?'
We Americans sit at the head of the banquet table, as we have done for a century. Our standard of living is luxurious by any measure.
I don't really know Hollywood, but living and shooting in L.A. was very motivating, inspiring. The lights, the extras, their American faces, the energy, the Orpheum Theatre. It was all very inspiring.
Americans spend much of their adult lives paying taxes in various forms. We should end this practice of paying a tax that is triggered only by debt.
Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room.
Our laws need to reflect the evolution of technology and the changing expectations of American society. This is why the Constitution is often called a 'living' document.
The first year I started in San Francisco, there was an American work on every program and there's been a lot of music by living composers and gradually that was part of the process of getting the audience really to trust me.
I romanticize. I live with the ghosts of Elvis and Frank Sinatra. It seems so glamorous. They were American men who don't exist anymore. But there are ugly things about them, too.
Within a lot of African-American households, I think, there's an idea that black men don't want to take an active participation in the lives of their children. That if they do, there has to be some sort of ulterior motive.
Movies give me an opportunity to go places. I'm not only a Swede but an American, not just a man of my time, but I've been living 2,000 years ago-and not just in a new country, America, but in the Holy Land, too.
