My natural accent is American. I chose to speak with a U.K. accent when I was about to enter the final year at drama school in London. I was going to try to find a way to stay in the U.K. after I finished college and could not imagine trying to live and get work there with an American accent.

I'm the daughter of refugees. The immigrant mentality is to work hard, be brave, and never give up in your pursuit of achieving the American dream.

The American Dream I believe in is one that provides anyone willing to work hard enough with the opportunity to succeed.

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

Second, this epic tale allows the audience to actually listen to the Native Americans and receive their wisdom. Spielberg conveys the respect for Native Americans that is normally lacking in Western films.

Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed levees and exploded the conventional wisdom about a shared American prosperity, exposing a group of people so poor they didn't have $50 for a bus ticket out of town. If we want to learn something from this disaster, the lesson ought to be: America's poor deserve better than this.

Wedding films are always about the differences between people. But they haven't quite dealt with African-Americans and Latinos.

Something that I think extends to a lot of African cultures is that the line between performer and audience is blurry. My mom would lead the wedding song regularly, and she isn't a professional singer. Even as an audience member, you're expected to clap and sing the response to the lead.

My wedding dress was featured by 'Vogue' and 'American Town and Country,' and from there, people started to come to us because they had seen that dress.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's time to stop the raid on the Social Security trust fund and start allowing Americans to invest their Social Security taxes in personal savings accounts.

If the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it's clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation, and I will not trust the Bush administration again.

I think the most important thing that I think everyone in America must have is belief that wherever they live, whatever station they have in life, that the American dream is alive and well. I think the fracturing of trust and confidence is in the American dream.

Because the Internet is so new, we still don't really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that's what we're used to. So people complain that there's a lot of rubbish online, or that it's dominated by Americans, or that you can't necessarily trust what you read on the Web.

But as far as being an American and loving this country and getting a chance to travel across it every day and meeting people on the road and folks in the military, I love this country on so many different levels.

American movies are often very good at mining those great underlying myths that make films robustly travel across class, age, gender, culture.

At American Airlines, we have built a business around the love of travel that has lasted three quarters of a century. And I'm pretty sure we're just getting started.

I wish more Americans would travel here. I always encourage my friends: 'Travel. See the Middle East. There's so much to see, so many good people.' And it's vice versa, and it helps stop problems of misunderstanding and stereotypes from happening.