It's a huge challenge a huge responsibility. Bond is a huge iconic figure in movie history. These opportunities don't come along very often so I thought 'Why not?'

Jews have a special relationship to books and the Haggadah has been translated more widely and reprinted more often than any other Jewish book. It is not a work of history or philosophy not a prayer book user's manual timeline poem or palimpsest - and yet it is all these things.

From Jefferson to Jackson to Lincoln to FDR to Reagan every great president inspires enormous affection and enormous hostility. We'll all be much saner I think if we remember that history is full of surprises and things that seemed absolutely certain one day are often unimaginable the next.

Young women today often have very little appreciation for the real battles that took place to get women where they are today in this country. I don't know how much history young women today know about those battles.

Our national history has so often filled us with bitterness and the feeling of helplessness.

The history of the last century shows as we shall see later that the advice given to governments by bankers like the advice they gave to industrialists was consistently good for bankers but was often disastrous for governments businessmen and the people generally.

I think documentaries are the greatest way to educate an entire generation that doesn't often look back to learn anything about the history that provided a safe haven for so many of us today.

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.

The worst mistake of first contact made throughout history by individuals on both sides of every new encounter has been the unfortunate habit of making assumptions. It often proved fatal.

I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power.