“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.

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

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.

Technology is usually there to let some process go on hidden in the background. For us on ‘MythBusters,’

There is a real diversity of talent and background on the A list so as to better reflect our society in all walks.

I come from both a writing background – with ‘Workaholics’ – and I also act in what I’ve written.

I am super-proud to have a sort of famous character in my background that if you’re a certain age, he was probably a part of your youth. I think that’s pretty cool.

I too searched far and wide for the cure to addiction, but my medical and psychiatric background did not lead me to the cure because the source of addiction does not lie here,.

I really thought that there was going be this moment when a ray of light from heaven would come pouring in, background music would start playing with angels singing, but none of that happens!

My family background was deeply Christian.

Coming from a background of being onstage, you’re onstage for two and a half hours and you’re in it for the whole time no matter what you’re doing. Even if you don’t have a line, you have to stay in it.