With the perspective afforded by the passage of time where does 9/11 rank as a turning point in our national history? For the victims and their families innocents going about their lives suddenly and brutally murdered no other day can ever matter as much.

I don't think that there's been one example in history where somebody has openly talked about their personal life and it's done them any good.

If I were beginning my career today I don't think I would take the same direction. Television is at a crossroads at the moment. And although I am not up to date technologically I suspect that somewhere out there people are conveying things about natural history by means other than television and I think if I were beginning today I'd be there.

Over the objections where they sound like squealing pigs over the objections of Romney and all his allies we passed some of the toughest Wall Street regulations in history turning Wall Street back into the allocator of capital it always has been and no longer a casino. And they want to repeal it.

Young women today often have very little appreciation for the real battles that took place to get women where they are today in this country. I don't know how much history young women today know about those battles.

Wherever you go in the history of America there have been Black people making contributions but their contributions have been obscured lost buried.

My father and I made genetics history. We were the first African-Americans and the first father and son anywhere to have their genomes sequenced.

But when one believes that you've been appointed by God for a particular mission in history you have to be very careful about that how you speak about that. Where is the self-reflection in that? Where is the humility in that?

There are times in history where a particular doctrine becomes a symbol of a greater problem.

I am totally fascinated by people and our history as I understand and continue to explore it. People have so much to give and so far to go and yet we have given and gone a great distance. It's really just interesting to ask: why not? And see where that takes me.

Imagine a part of the U.S.A. from which the U.S.A. started - where is the cradle of your history? This is Kosovo for Serbia.

All History is current all injustice continues on some level somewhere in the world.

A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas a place where history comes to life.

Rome - the city of visible history where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

And remember where you have a concentration of power in a few hands all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that.

We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. But they've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go.

This is a moment in history where it is almost hard to catch your breath.

History shows that where ethics and economics come in conflict victory is always with economics. Vested interests have never been known to have willingly divested themselves unless there was sufficient force to compel them.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history since its statements are rather of the nature of universals whereas those of history are singulars.

My father was a member of the Teamsters Union in California where he helped to organize better health care for workers. My mother worked for more than 20 years on an assembly line.

If your access to health care involves your leaving work and driving somewhere and parking and waiting for a long time that's not going to promote healthiness.

We immigrants can sometimes sound a little hysterical about this because we come from places that have tried this and we know where it leads. Anybody who's lived in countries with socialized health care knows that it becomes the dominant political issue.

My cooking philosophy what I try to do is to make a cuisine where the produce and the product shines compared to some current trends that are maybe more adding additional things like molecular cuisine with a lot of additives and chemicals which are now showing that they could be bad for your health.

We have one of the few societies the only one I can think of right offhand where your health care is so tied to your job so that when an American company has to hire they have to think about health care.