The sacrifices ordinary American men and women from communities large and small have been willing to make, often before they were past their teenage years, have secured our nation unprecedented freedoms and made us the world's bulwark of liberty.
Laos is the ghost of American military interventions past.
Not disown my past or upbringing, but I'd admired American actors, really American movie star - particularly the rebel heroes of the '50s.
That song didn't just happen. It grew out of my experiences. 'American Pie' was part of my process of self-awakening: a mystical trip into my past.
We must get the American public to look past the glitter, beyond the showmanship, to the reality, the hard substance of things. And we'll do it not so much with speeches that will bring people to their feet as with speeches that bring people to their senses.
If today is anything like the typical day of the past 3 years, three American soldiers will die in Iraq or Afghanistan, the Taliban will get a little stronger in Afghanistan and the civil war will continue to be enhanced in Iraq.
Over the past two years, the House has passed more than 50 measures focused on stimulating the economy and expanding opportunities for American workers. The tax relief provisions in this package have been an important part of our pro-growth agenda.
We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.
A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia.
I've always had the wish, the nostalgia to be able to write detective novels. At heart, the principal themes of detective novels are close to the things that obsess me: disappearance, the problems of identity, amnesia, the return to an enigmatic past.
Beyond institutional amnesia, a rejection of causal analysis is the existential rock on which American Exceptionalism sits. The United States unique sense of itself depends on an ambiguous relationship to the past. History is affirmed, since it is America's unprecedented historical success that justifies the exceptionalism.
Most academic historians accept that historians' own circumstances demand that they tell the story in a particular way, of course. While people wring their hands about 'revisionist' historians; on some level, the correction and amplification of various parts of the past is not 'revisionism' as it is simply the process of any historical writing.
In the past, I have not been able to hear myself. I play with feeling so I need to hear what is coming out of the amplifier to inspire me; I don't just play mechanically.
The whole enterprise of teaching managers is steeped in the ethic of data-driven analytical support. The problem is, the data is only available about the past. So the way we've taught managers to make decisions and consultants to analyze problems condemns them to taking action when it's too late.
Our past is a story existing only in our minds. Look, analyze, understand, and forgive. Then, as quickly as possible, chuck it.
My heroes and heroines are often unlikely people who are dragged into situations without meaning to become involved, or people with a past that has never quite left them. They are often isolated, introspective people, often confrontational or anarchic in some way, often damaged or secretly unhappy or incomplete.
To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter.'
The beauty of America is that I don't have to deny my past to affirm my present. No one does. We can love this nation like a parent and still embrace our ancestral home like cherished grandparents.
Greatness will come by looking forward - untethered from the politics of the past and anchored by our shared values - and by changing our nation's future.
I have hosted many shows in the past. Anchoring is something I really enjoy; hence, when I was offered to host the show 'Super Dancer,' I was excited to take it up.
