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.