In the Atlantean period there were many energies being used and information and knowledge being used which were for particular reasons of safety withdrawn shall we say to prevent complete catastrophe to prevent total destruction of your planet.

We had periodic crises in this country when the technical intelligence didn't support the policy. We had the bomber gap the missile gap.

Ellis Peters's historical detail is very accurate and very minute and therefore is not only interesting to read but good for an actor to acquire a sense of the period. And the other thing I think is that an actor lives in the land of imagination.

About 15 years ago I went though a period of a year or so when I just couldn't find anything good. My wife noticed I was having trouble reading menus. I bought some cheap reading glasses in a drug store. I got home and suddenly all these books that weren't good were good.

Never in our country's history have we witnessed a natural disaster that has impacted so many people in such a wide area. In fact as of the writing of this column millions of people along the Gulf Coast have been displaced from their homes in a period of only five days.

Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.

History has not dealt kindly with the aftermath of protracted periods of low risk premiums.

If good history is dispassionate history it must naturally wait until the passions of the period subside.

Let me tell you never before in the history of this planet has anybody made the progress that African-Americans have made in a 30-year period in spite of many black folks and white folks lying to one another.

I'm inspired by history different periods.

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.

No country in the history of the world has ever contributed more to humankind and accomplished more for its people in so brief a period of time as Israel has done since its relatively recent rebirth in 1948.

No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high idealistic motives and idealism in our time has been shoved aside and we are paying the penalty for it.

For one who reads there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived for fiction biography and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world in all periods of time.

The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history. I mean in this century's history. But we all lived in this century. I didn't live in this century.

It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn't get confined permanently blocked as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.

Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.