While tributes to Americans who had lost their lives in battle had been held in a number of towns across the nation one of the more well-known stories about the beginnings of Memorial Day is the story about General John Logan.

Nowadays many Americans have forgotten the meaning and traditions of Memorial Day. At cemeteries across the country the graves of the fallen are sadly ignored and worse neglected.

The average American is nothing if not patriotic.

My fellow Americans ask not what your country can do for you ask what you can do for your country.

In 1934 the American Jewish charities offered to find homes for 300 German refugee children. We were on the SS Washington bound for New York Christmas 1934.

Brits and Americans have hundreds of different phrases for the same thing. Luckily it's usually a source of amusement rather than frustration. A flashlight by any other name is still a torch. My personal favourite is 'fairy lights ' which we boringly refer to as 'Christmas lights.'

Black Friday is not another bad hair day in Wall Street. It's the term used by American retailers to describe the day after the Thanksgiving Holiday seen as the semi-official start of Christmas shopping season.

As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly when they meet with an obstacle mount to the sky. So up to the house-top the coursers they flew with the sleigh full of toys and St. Nicholas too.

I am living proof that the American dream still exists. It is still alive and well. There is only one trick you have to be willing to roll up your sleeves and work very very hard.

The biggest risk I've ever taken is going on American Idol and trying to be myself. I wasn't going to try too hard to conform and I knew that it could possibly not work out.

One can not be an American by going about saying that one is an American. It is necessary to feel America like America love America and then work.

I met an American woman and got married so I had to get a job.

Managers in all too many American companies do not achieve the desired results because nobody makes them do it.

Yale is a crucible in American life for the accommodation of intellectual achievement of wisdom of refinement with the democratic ideals of openness of social justice and of equal opportunity.

Conventional wisdom holds that setting a timetable for getting American troops out of Iraq would be a mistake.

The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity every crack in the common front against fascism.

The lowest form of popular culture - lack of information misinformation disinformation and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people's lives - has overrun real journalism. Today ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts foreign ideas alien philosophies and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

Our cattlemen have given us the safest most abundant most affordable beef supply in the world and I trust their judgment. And if you look at consumer confidence in this country so does the American public.

I think the industry finally gets it. They've lost the connection with the American public and they've got to rebuild the trust with the American public.

The American people want to have trust in their leaders.

And I believe that public broadcasting has an important trust with the American people it's an intimate medium of television and that we can do reading and language development for young children without getting into human sexuality.

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.

Americans have been given goals to achieve in Iraq but not the standards by which to measure progress. And the only assurance Americans have been given that we can reach those goals is to trust the President and his Administration at their word.