Most cooks try to learn by making dishes. Doesn't mean you can cook. It means you can make that dish. When you can cook is when you can go to a farmers market buy a bunch of stuff then go home and make something without looking at a recipe. Now you're cooking.

Abstention means you stayed at home or went to the beach. By casting a blank vote you're saying you have a political conscience but you don't agree with any of the existing parties.

The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.

Do you know what it means to come home at night to a woman who'll give you a little love a little affection a little tenderness? It means you're in the wrong house that's what it means.

More people have more access to more readers for less money than ever before in history. It means a lot of dross but it means a lot of very talented people can find and nurture a readership in ways that were not possible twenty years ago. From a creative perspective that is all that writing is about.

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.

If history is a guide a victory for Obama means he faces the prospect of a second term dogged by scandal or inertia.

We can't understand when we're pregnant or when our siblings are expecting how profound it is to have a shared history with a younger generation: blood genes humor. It means we were actually here on Earth for a time - like the Egyptians with their pyramids only with children.

The Carter Center has the only existing international taskforce on disease eradication. Which means a total elimination of a disease on the face of the Earth. In the history of the world there's only been one disease eradicated: smallpox. The second disease I think is gonna be guinea worm.

It is not history which uses men as a means of achieving - as if it were an individual person - its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.