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I am an optimist about America.

I'm a serious optimist. I come from a country where you have little to be hopeful for, and so you have to always be an optimist.

It may be the optimist in me, but I think America has a uniquely powerful and capacious glue internally. The American identity has always been ethnically and religiously neutral, so within one generation you have Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Jamaican-Americans - they feel American. It's a huge success story.

It felt to me like America was always wanting to resolve things too quickly, without thinking through what the costs and consequences would be and how that affects an individual living in that world. Then as I grew up and went about my life, I think I just got more and more interested in that gray area where things are not so easily quantified.

I'm an optimist about other people. I'm not an optimist about myself.

I'm an optimist by nature.

I'm an optimist in the sense that I believe humans are noble and honorable, and some of them are really smart. I have a very optimistic view of individuals.

I'm an optimist about humanity in general, I suppose.

I grew up in a small town in northeastern Indiana. I had an all-American childhood. And I grew up as an optimist.

I'm not an optimist. I'm a realist. And my reality is that we live in a multifaceted, multicultural world. And maybe once we stop labeling ourselves, then maybe everyone else will.