If your house is burning wouldn't you try and put out the fire?

If I had been elected president in 1948 history would be vastly different. I believe we would have stemmed the growth of Big Government which had begun with the New Deal and culminated with the Great Society.

What would be the nicest thing I could say about Newt Gingrich? He may be one of the great supporters of the humanities because you have people who don't want to study the social sciences because it's not profitable and now Newt as the highest-paid historian in American history may be an encouragement to people to study history.

It would be incredibly presumptuous and self-serving of me to believe that Facebook was the end of history. The only way it could possibly be the end of history is if it becomes some sort of artificial super intelligence that takes over the world.

If I had a choice as to my perfect career I would make a couple of films a year and then concentrate on natural history.

I wanted to make sure that the man who found the genie would not take terrible advantage of her so he needed to be a person of integrity and honor - which is why I made the male lead an astronaut. The rest as they say is history.

If history philosophy and so on vanish from academic life what they leave in their wake may be a technical training facility or corporate research institute. But it will not be a university in the classical sense of the term and it would be deceptive to call it one.

History is littered with wars which everybody knew would never happen.

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

Of course nobody would deny the importance of human beings for theological thinking but the time span of history that theologians think about is a few thousand years of human culture rather than the fifteen billion years of the history of the universe.

In my early 20s I studied history and politics and I really thought that perhaps I would devote my life to that.

When President Obama entered the White House the economy was in a free-fall. The auto industry: on its back. The banks: frozen up. More than three million Americans had already lost their jobs. And America's bravest our men and women in uniform were fighting what would soon be the longest wars in our history.

I just think it would be unrealistic to suggest we're going to eliminate every last domestic insurgent in Afghanistan. Certainly the history of the country would indicate that's not a very realistic objective and I think we have to have realistic objectives.

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.

This is what I would have done if I had to have a real job: I would have been a history teacher.

Our liberal New York/Washington-based media would never in a million years put Liberal Godfather Ted Kennedy on the spot about his clan's bad behavior to whose lurid history he himself has contributed so much.

I have the opportunity to be part of swimming history. To take the sport to a new level would be an honor for me. There's no better time to try this than now.