Accuracy is paramount in every detail of a work of history. Here's my rule: Ask yourself 'Did this thing happen?' If the answer is yes then it's historical. Then ask 'Did this thing happen precisely this way?' If the answer is yes then it's history if the answer is no not precisely this way then it's historical drama.

Life is a wonderful thing to talk about or to read about in history books - but it is terrible when one has to live it.

Serbian history tells that the family is the most important thing and you have to stick with the family.

The '80s were fabulous. The '90s sucked and the '70s were just a sad sad time in human history. Go 1980s! There's something that's just so cute about that time. And not just yellow nail polish and 'I'm a loner.'

Everything was going my way. I was happily marching into the history books. Then it all just fell apart.

When I arrived at Columbia I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry French history French literature.

He was what I often think is a dangerous thing for a statesman to be - a student of history and like most of those who study history he learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.

If history could teach us anything it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization.

Every writer has his writing technique - what he can and can't do to describe something like war or history. I'm not good at writing about those things but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

I don't really think of things in terms of legacy or where I stand in the history of Nintendo or anything like that.

I don't seem to be able to learn from experience or anything useful. History doesn't help me. Precedents don't inform my experience.

If the history of the Day of Atonement has anything to say to us now it is: never relieve individuals of moral responsibility. The more we have the more we grow.

I'm quite good at taking in information so I voraciously inhale Wikipedia - which may have some things wrong in it but I think is generally more information than we had before. Last tour we didn't have Wikipedia. And then Discovery Channel and History Channel. I can take it in and retain what I think are the most important facts.

So the old Copenhagen interpretation needs to be generalized needs to be replaced by something that can be used for the whole universe and can be used also in cases where there is plenty of individuality and history.

I just read an 800-page history of the Scottish Enlightenment and honestly I may as well just start it again now because I cannot remember a single thing. I can barely remember where Scotland is.

Some might think that George W. Bush had his shortcomings but let me tell you something - history's going to be kind to George W. Bush.

Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.

Cause and effect the riddle of all history is a particular devil in financial history and never more so than today where entire classes of security are collapsing not on public exchanges and stock-tickers but because there are no markets to establish prices this side of nothing.

The year 2008 was a reminder to those who had forgotten that there is such a thing as history and that the cycle of famine and feast in commerce first identified in antiquity and well understood in the Middle Ages was not suddenly abolished in modern times.

History will point out some of the things I did wrong and some of the things I did right.

But let me tell you this gender thing is history. You're looking at a guy who sat down with Margaret Thatcher across the table and talked about serious issues.

Jews have a special relationship to books and the Haggadah has been translated more widely and reprinted more often than any other Jewish book. It is not a work of history or philosophy not a prayer book user's manual timeline poem or palimpsest - and yet it is all these things.

From Jefferson to Jackson to Lincoln to FDR to Reagan every great president inspires enormous affection and enormous hostility. We'll all be much saner I think if we remember that history is full of surprises and things that seemed absolutely certain one day are often unimaginable the next.

I'm trying to make a case for those people who don't have a sense of belonging that they should have that there is something really worthwhile in having a sense of belonging and recasting and looking at our modern history.