“Spending a weekend with Hitler would have been boring in the extreme, although you would have had a greater certainty in coming back alive.”

The Welfare State, South Africa – and it becomes impossible to seriously confront any of them without understanding their historical background.

Democracy is not about making speeches. It is about making committees work.

Evil is a form of incompetence.

Take any important issue of our time – Northern Ireland, Nuclear Disarmament, Race,

A nation’s sense of its history is indistinguishable from its social cohesion.

Hitler’s dictatorship rested on the constitutional foundation of a single law, the Enabling Law.

The corruption of people is to behave in an inhuman way.

But to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance.

No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade.

History, well taught, is the demythologising of the past.

Bullock by name, and Bullock by nature.

Hitler had a plausible case to argue when he claimed that the Anschluss was only the application of the Wilsonian principle of self-determination.

If the country is to survive as a democracy it will depend on voters who understand how our political institutions have evolved and the events that went into their creation.

No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in the paper nor money in the back either. Just refuse to bear them.

I fell so many times and got back up. I been through the toughest times with my family, but I’m still standing.

I’m going back to the old Shaq. I was normal last year – I was an earthling last summer. I had to go back to my alien roots.

I’m proud to have been a Yankee. But I have found more happiness and contentment since I came back home to San Francisco than any man has a right to deserve. This is the friendliest city in the world.

The very old certainly do not go back on lunch remains but they do bite back at old conversational topics.

That, for me, actually is the most important thing about doing a period film is trying to make these people as lovable as they are back then.

ISIS says they want to go back and reject modernity? Well, I think we should help them. We ought to bomb them back to the Stone Age.

I remember being about six years old, for the first day of school, and sitting in the back of a Chrysler, pretending to cry while listening to Tracy Chapman.