A lesser complaint: hair extensions. There are moments on 'All My Children' when half the women actors young and old seem to be afflicted by android Barbie creep. All those thick swatches of lifeless strands clustering lankly round ladies' necks! Like orange tanning spray this is a fashion fad that should be put out of its misery.

With women I've got a long bamboo pole with a leather loop on the end. I slip the loop around their necks so they can't get away or come too close. Like catching snakes.

Bias has to be taught. If you hear your parents downgrading women or people of different backgrounds why you are going to do that.

Ageism works in both directions. As a teenager in the public eye people would talk condescendingly to me. When you get older there's this feeling that you have to start carving up your face and body. Right now I'm in the middle ground - I think women in their thirties are taken seriously.

I'm surrounded by very powerful women and very progressive men.

There's always a miasma of misinformation emerging from the higher education sector as to which are the 'best' courses to take. My advice would always be to ignore the perceived wisdom and look for the most reliable evidence on the ground.

Many people have their reputations as reporters and analysts because they are on television batting around conventional wisdom. A lot of these people have never reported a story.

Around '93 '94 the conventional wisdom about the Internet was that it was a toy for academics and researchers. So it was very very underestimated for about two years.

He who lives by the crystal ball soon learns to eat ground glass.

Wise sayings often fall on barren ground but a kind word is never thrown away.

If you're trying to achieve there will be roadblocks. I've had them everybody has had them. But obstacles don't have to stop you. If you run into a wall don't turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it go through it or work around it.

I felt very unstressed on my wedding day. I'm very grateful for that... spending the day on my own being super quiet and happy and just puttering around doing my own thing.

But the war on terror as I have repeatedly said in the past and the Afghan people believe in it in truth is that the war on terror is not in the Afghan villages or homes. Its in the sanctuaries it is in the training grounds its in the motivation factors and the money that comes to it.

During the Cold War we were interested because we were scared that Russia and the United States were going to go to war. We were scared that Russia was going to take over the world. Every country became a battleground.

Strategic thinkers were naturally rattled to find this outsider fooling around with their work. They had been thinking strategically when Reagan was just another movie actor playing opposite a chimpanzee for heaven's sake. They think Reagan is too naive too innocent to grasp the intellectual complexities of cold war strategy.

There is a strong tendency in the United States to rally round the flag and their troops no matter how mistaken the war.

A boy doesn't have to go to war to be a hero he can say he doesn't like pie when he sees there isn't enough to go around.