I think to be - for me to be an American is - you know it's one of the greatest things in the world for - you know for me just because I've been able to grow up with everything. The freedom. You know in my eyes this is the greatest country in the world.

If our freedom is taken the American dream will wither and die.

The Declaration of Independence was always our vision of who we wanted to be our ideal of freedom and justice how we were going to be different and what the American experiment was going to be about.

Bush sees the evil as out there in the wider world residing in people who 'hate freedom'. Look at his immediate response to the pictures of prisoner abuse this is not what Americans do these are not our values.

While Democrats fussed with the details of health care reforms conservatives spent months telling the nation that the real issue is freedom that what's on the line is American liberty itself.

There's a glorious sense of freedom in comedy just allowing myself to tell jokes allowing myself to interrupt myself and tell old African folk stories that I made up - or didn't - and Jamaican stories.

The American dream is about freedom.

To me the American Dream is being able to follow your own personal calling. To be able to do what you want to do is incredible freedom.

If the events of September 11 2001 have proven anything it's that the terrorists can attack us but they can't take away what makes us American - our freedom our liberty our civil rights. No only Attorney General John Ashcroft can do that.

Watching President Obama apologize last week for America's arrogance - before a French audience that owes its freedom to the sacrifices of Americans - helped convince me that he has a deep-seated antipathy toward American values and traditions.