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'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.
History will point out some of the things I did wrong and some of the things I did right.
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.
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.
When you think of how history is revealed we know certain things to be facts at certain periods of time which turn out not to be so factual as time marches on.
Sometimes history takes things into its own hands.
History is the science of things which are not repeated.
It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past.
When you say things like 'We have to wipe out the Taliban ' what does that mean? The Taliban is not a fixed number of people. The Taliban is an ideology that has sprung out of a history that you know America created anyway.
Even in high school I was very interested in history - why people do the things they do. As a kid I spent a lot of time trying to relate the past to the present.
There's something quite exciting when you have a history with somebody and you see them do new and different things.
History will see advertising as one of the real evil things of our time. It is stimulating people constantly to want things want this want that.
Their memory's like a train: you can see it getting smaller as it pulls away And the things you can't remember Tell the things you can't forget that History puts a saint in every dream.
History repeats itself and that's one of the things that's wrong with history.
No humorist is under any obligation to provide answers and probably if you were to delve into the literary history of humour it's probably all about not providing answers because the humorist essentially says: this is the way things are.
Life isn't meant to be easy. It's hard to take being on the top - or on the bottom. I guess I'm something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history I think to survive some of these things... Life is one crisis after another.
Things have never been more like the way they are today in history.
Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.
I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief... For a time I rest in the grace of the world and am free.
Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done.
History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided.