Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home wondering why the hell you went.

What the New Yorker calls home would seem like a couple of closets to most Americans yet he manages not only to live there but also to grow trees and cockroaches right on the premises.

Yes Americans can still get credit for cars and trucks and refrigerators and those businesses are doing well. But just try to get a home loan now.

Here at home when Americans were standing in long lines to give blood after the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon we squandered an obvious opportunity to make service a noble cause again and rekindle an American spirit of community.

I am not suggesting that all those missionary organizations working in Haiti should pack up and go home but I am urging them to understand that Haiti does not need clever Americans with newly contrived schemes for saving their country.

The penalty for getting mugged in an American city and losing your ID is that you can't fly home.

There are more than 300 000 families in the Gulf region that lost their homes and are waiting for peace of mind. The hurricane exposed the sad reality of poverty in America. We saw in all its horrific detail the vulnerabilities of living in inadequate housing and the heartbreak of losing one's home.

We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10 thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.

Now I know there are many Americans who say 'Get out of Afghanistan. Bring 'em all home.' And there are others who say 'Put in hundreds of thousands of more.'

Africa for the Africans... at home and abroad!

Today's misery is real unemployment home foreclosures and bankruptcies. This is the Obama Misery Index and its at a record high. Its going to take more than new rhetoric to put Americans back to work - its going to take a new president.

For most of our history Americans enjoyed both liberty and security from foreign threats.

What would be the nicest thing I could say about Newt Gingrich? He may be one of the great supporters of the humanities because you have people who don't want to study the social sciences because it's not profitable and now Newt as the highest-paid historian in American history may be an encouragement to people to study history.

The American people voted to restore integrity and honesty in Washington D.C. and the Democrats intend to lead the most honest most open and most ethical Congress in history.

I like American history.

For most of our history no one dared to tell Americans 'you don't build that.'

The great and abiding lesson of American history particularly the cold war is that the engine of capitalism the individual is mightier than any collective.

When President Obama entered the White House the economy was in a free-fall. The auto industry: on its back. The banks: frozen up. More than three million Americans had already lost their jobs. And America's bravest our men and women in uniform were fighting what would soon be the longest wars in our history.

I think it was my study of history that convinced me that the Democratic Party was more on the side of the average American.

Let me tell you never before in the history of this planet has anybody made the progress that African-Americans have made in a 30-year period in spite of many black folks and white folks lying to one another.

We have our own history our own language our own culture. But our destiny is also tied up with the destinies of other people - history has made us all South Africans.

September 11 was terrible but if one goes back over the history of the IRA what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.

Obama has seen to the passage of the most radical legislation in recent American history and so-called 'progressives' should be thanking him for it - even as many of the rest of us rear in horror from its implications.

Nixon in 1968 unlike Obama 2008 was elected as a minority president with only 43 percent of the vote. Yet in 1972 he won what in some measures was the most lopsided election in American history with 61 percent.