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.