There are 320 million American dreams. Go get yours.

American musicals are, for the most part, about boys, or boyish pursuits and aspirations - the fantasy of freedom and resolve - and those dreams have little to do with the reality of most black women's lives.

In my childhood, America was like a religion. Then, real-life Americans abruptly entered my life - in jeeps - and upset all my dreams.

Richard Nixon had a kind of Walter Mitty fantasy life. He was a man with a grandiose thoughts: dreams of not simply being president but maybe becoming one of the truly great presidents of American history.

For American filmmakers, the Oscars is like a mystic thing. For me, it was being in a mirror of my dreams when I was dreaming of Hollywood when I was an adolescent.

As an older generation, we need to give all our young people love and the possibility of realizing their dreams. For instance, if I get really political, the fact that some people can't go to college, can't even think about college, that's not American; that's not right.

Mothers have always held such symbolic weight in determining a person's worth. Your mother tongue, your motherland, your mother's values - these things can qualify or disqualify you from attaining myriad American dreams: love, fluency, citizenship, legitimacy, acceptance, success, freedom.

I never take for granted how lucky I am to be an American and what a privilege it is to spend each day at a nonprofit dedicated to helping the next generation of girls achieve their dreams. My journey, as the daughter of refugees, shows what refugees and the children of refugees can create for all Americans.

Know thyself. Remain steadfast. Follow your dreams. These are great directives and perfectly fitting for graduates. But reality is that achieving dreams takes a solid education - education that remains elusive for too many Americans.

What I love about America is not necessarily the American Dream but the fact that there's so much spirit of fighting to continue to dream once the dreams are broken.

We must stop talking about the American dream and start listening to the dreams of Americans.

This is the city of dreamers and time and again it's the place where the greatest dream of all, the American dream, has been tested and has triumphed.

I don't diet. I'm Puerto Rican! You can never take my rice, pork, and beans away.

Americans get fatter and fatter and buy more and more diet books, but you don't lose weight by buying diet books - you go on a diet. It's easy to read a diet book, but it's hard to go on a diet.

A program to make municipal composting of food and yard waste mandatory and then distributing the compost free to area farmers would shrink America's garbage heap, cut the need for irrigation and fossil-fuel fertilizers in agriculture, and improve the nutritional quality of the American diet.

I kind of want to get the music back on a road it hasn't been on for a while. I want to promote the arts as part of the American diet.

Bacon has been a staple of the American diet since the first European settlers, but until recently, it was consumed in a predictable, seasonal pattern. The bulk of sales came from home consumers, diners, and pancake houses, which fried it up along with eggs for breakfast.

American cities are not scaled to the energy diet of the future. They have become too large. They're over-scaled.

The American diet causes disease. It is composed of 25 percent animal products and 62 percent processed foods and only 5 percent of calories from fruits and vegetables.

In the African-American community, we struggle with a lot of health problems that have a lot to do with our diet.

For most teenage runners, the right foods means a varied diet, decreasing the amount of fat found in the typical American diet and replacing those calories with carbohydrates. Avoid saturated fats, such as those found in fried foods, and eat plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables.

Most Americans live on a diet that includes processed fare that is neither fresh nor natural.

Making changes in the fast food that makes up such a significant part of the American diet, even if the numbers aren't impressive, will have important health up sides.

I grew up with the Blind Boys' music. My family owns a music store in Claremont, California, called The Claremont Folk Music Center. I grew up with a heavy diet of gospel, folk, and blues because those are kind of the cornerstones of traditional American music.