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.

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

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.'

Americans like fat books and thin women.

It is now conventional wisdom that Americans do not care why we went to war in Iraq that it is enough that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein.

And of course in the Philippines there were so many thousands of Americans that were captured by the Japanese and held and who were rescued by Filipino Americans or Filipinos I should say and by U.S. troops near the close of the war.

World War II the atomic bomb the Cold War made it hard for Americans to continue their optimism.

It's very important to go back and keep in mind the distinction between handling these events as criminal acts which was the way we did before 9/11 and then looking at 9/11 and saying 'This is not a criminal act ' not when you destroy 16 acres of Manhattan kill 3 000 Americans blow a big hole in the Pentagon. That's an act of war.

We are Americans when we go to war and when we return we are Mexicans.

In the months leading up to World War II there was a tendency among many Americans to talk absently about the trouble in Europe. Nothing that happened an ocean away seemed very threatening.

It is not patriotic to commit young Americans to war unless our national security clearly requires it.

Say what you want to say about the rest of his presidency including his tone-deaf response to Katrina and a war waged in Iraq on false pretenses Bush connected with Americans in the aftermath of 9/11 because he looked as frail and unforgiving as we felt.

I was a little girl in World War II and I'm used to being freed by Americans.

It was quite a European war until 1917 when the Americans joined up. They don't have the same sense of the loss of innocence and the cataclysmic loss of life. A whole generation was wiped out.

The war on terror is the most insane and immoral war of all time. The Americans are doing what they did in Vietnam bombing villages. But how can a civilised nation do this? How can you can eliminate suspects their wives their children their families their neighbours? How can you justify this?

Americans play to win at all times. I wouldn't give a hoot and hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Americans have never lost nor ever lose a war.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Constitution preserves the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation where the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.

Americans have the right and advantage of being armed - unlike the citizens of other countries whose governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.

This is my first opportunity to visit this part of North Africa so I am going to be able to go back home and talk about this beautiful country and encourage Americans to travel here.