No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English Mandarin or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today.

Geological change usually takes thousands of years to happen but we are seeing the climate changing not just in our lifetimes but also year by year.

The damage that climate change is causing and that will get worse if we fail to act goes beyond the hundreds of thousands of lives homes and businesses lost ecosystems destroyed species driven to extinction infrastructure smashed and people inconvenienced.

There is no progress whatever. Everything is just the same as it was thousands and tens of thousands of years ago. The outward form changes. The essence does not change.

As you get older things conk out. It's a bit like a car. As long as it's something the mechanics can fix you can chug on for a few more thousand miles.

The energy of the crowd is insane. Twenty thousand people. It's the biggest jolt of adrenaline. It's very hard to explain. You know the old story about the woman lifting the car off her kid? It's in that realm. You can actually hurt yourself and not know it.

For two thousand years the Church has guided the development of music carefully legislating to fuse artistic talent and aesthetic beauty with the demands of the Faith.

Many a genius has been slow of growth. Oaks that flourish for a thousand years do not spring up into beauty like a reed.

In just the same way the thousands of successive positions of a runner are contracted into one sole symbolic attitude which our eye perceives which art reproduces and which becomes for everyone the image of a man who runs.

It's important to debunk the myths of Africa being this benighted continent civilized only when white people arrived. In fact Africans had been creators of culture for thousands of years before. These were very intelligent subtle and sophisticated people with organized societies and great art.