I spend a lot of time on college campuses, a lot of time mentoring young women in all sectors of business, because I don't want them to spend as much time to get their voice as I did.

I covered Katrina, I've covered the tsunamis, all of them, the Haiti earthquake... you get to a certain point in your career where you say, 'I want to now cover what I want to cover.'

The only way to save a rhinoceros is to save the environment in which it lives, because there's a mutual dependency between it and millions of other species of both animals and plants.

Steve Irwin did wonderful conservation work but I was uncomfortable about some of his stunts. Even if animals aren't aware that you are not treating them with respect, the viewers are.

You ask 20 of your friends how English and American democracy came about. None of them would say that Anglicanism or Protestantism had anything to do with it. But it was crucial to it!

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, which is a pity because this week the National Association of Beholders wrote to tell me that I've got a face like a rucksack full of dented bells.

Speed focuses the mind. It cuts through the fog of drab everyday living and keeps us on our toes. Speed works. Speed saves lives. Speed is good. And we should have more of it, not less.

We start out as sand and soot out there in the universe, and who knows, in 40 trillion years' time we might come back. But if we come back without memory, it doesn't really interest me.

It is very much in America's national security interests to ensure that the Taliban do not dominate Afghanistan and that neither ISIS nor al Qaeda continues their growth in the country.

I believe the world economy will crash when Russia or China moves to a gold-backed currency. They know that when this thing blows, the old law returns: he with most gold makes the rules.

Baseball is a game that shouts, 'Slow Down' to America. Stop tweeting, texting, blogging, watching cable news, and obsessing about polls, lost planes, and focus-group-driven politicians.

Everyone has a smart phone, and everything is recorded. One event spills into another. Conclusions come quickly at the near total expense of consideration of what just actually happened.

That's not something that we've gone in thinking 'Right! How are we going to examine that now?' It's just when you take a step back you see that they're actually all sort of in that mode.

If love were a product, the queue at the faulty goods desk would stretch right round the universe and back. It doesn't work properly. The seams come apart and it's full of powdered glass.

It's your glove, your baseball glove. It's got a soul, a memory all its own, and a future that never fades because it has never let go of the grasp the past has on you and so many others.

I think it's insane, absolutely insane for a person to have one of the highest and most important jobs in the entire world to be saying that he has to be at his children's soccer practice.

The notion of ever more old people needing ever more young people, who will in turn grow old and need even more young people, and so on ad infinitum, is an obvious ecological Ponzi scheme.

I'd just find a story in Canada and come and do it. Combine harvester banger - actually I've done that: banger racing up in Red Deer [in Alberta, for his 1998 doc series Extreme Machines].

Intelligence alone does not get us where we need to go or even necessarily where we want to go. For that, the human creature must exercise harder-won capacities of wisdom, and wise action.

I actually admire some of the books by a lot of the writers who write magic realism very much, but it's not for me. It's not what I can do, but even if I could, I don't really want to try.

Magna Carta has 63 clauses in abbreviated Latin. Two of them that are still on the statute book, numbers 39 and 40, could be said to have changed the way in which the free world has grown.

That's what reading was for my mother, and became for me - a way to escape, a private time machine, a place that began with moral instruction but soon morphed into empathy and imagination.

The truth is: the natural world is changing. And we are totally dependent on that world. It provides our food, water and air. It is the most precious thing we have and we need to defend it.

Television of course actually started in Britain in 1936, and it was a monopoly, and there was only one broadcaster and it operated on a license which is not the same as a government grant.

The idea that the Lord had given us a present, that the world is a gift from God... well, the amount of stuff, back then, that the Lord was giving away was limited. We do not have dominion.

Very few people live in the same house they move into when they're married or the same neighborhood when they're married. Very few people certainly live in the neighborhood they grew up in.

Bin Laden's death is just a punctuation point on a set of problems they've had for a long time. I think the prognosis for al-Qaida and groups like it is really bad, and that's a good thing.

Am I a liberal or conservative? I'm neither. Like most Americans, I find politics very frustrating. Like most Americans, I'd like to hear from politicians the facts. That is what drives me.

I remember when I realised, as a child, 'That stuff on the TV about nuclear bombs is real! Why isn't everyone running around shouting 'Aaarrgghh'? Why are people still buying bicycle clips?'

We live in the worst country in the world. At least we do for lazy, inefficient, office-bound police, whose response to an extraordinary rise in violent crime is to order more speed cameras.

In the 40 or so years I've known David Puttnam, not only has he pursued an outstanding career in films and now politics, but he has been the keeper of the flame of the British film industry.

Sadly, it seems as if there is no longer any real history. Just momentary reactions to events that disappear like sky-writing with items like Twitter, texts, Meerkat, Snapchat, and Instagram.

The biggest teenage taboo is being strait-laced. It's easy to tell a researcher you went to a house party that turned into an orgy. It's less easy to say you like eating toast and watching QI.

...it seemed appropriate that I should develop some kind of illness. This is a good idea when you are at a loose end because everything, up to and including herpes, is better than being bored.

Italy's youngsters complain, apparently, about having to live at home until they are 72 but that's because they spend all their money on suits and coffee and Alfa Romeos rather than mortgages.

The problem is that television executives have got it into their heads that if one presenter on a show is a blonde-haired, blue-eyed heterosexual boy, the other must be a black Muslim lesbian.

I had been a journalist in Europe and then went to divinity school in the early 1990s, and came out as somebody who had the perspective of a journalist and was now also theologically educated.

Cardinal Raymond Burke is a 66-year-old guy who lives in Rome, dresses like Queen Elizabeth, and talks like someone who majored in misogyny at some bogus, backwoods, Bible-banging tent school.

The deep problems that afflict the Middle East are not easy to fix, but they must be dealt with if we are not to see a son of ISIS, or even a grandson of ISIS, developing in the years to come.

I'm still not sure what pulled me into the career I chose, even though, now, I can't imagine having done anything else. Mostly, I think I wanted to be a writer, or at least to try for a while.

There's this very vulnerable planet of ours with finite resources. Architects and designers have, I think, a fair responsibility for conserving energy and materials, and making things durable.

Because drug dealers shoot each other in London, Norfolk farmers can't have guns to defend their homes. I mean, no one wants a gun - except at 4am when they hear a strange sound in the kitchen.

Trump has claimed he knows more about ISIS than America's leading generals. Clearly, this is also total nonsense; he doesn't seem to have done the slightest thing to educate himself about ISIS.

My hair journey involved a lot of trying to figure out how to deal with my hair as a bi-racial girl in a white community living in Long Island, N.Y., where no one had a clue what to do with it.

The population of the United Kingdom has, for the first time, reached sixty million. If they stood on each other's shoulders they would reach perhaps twenty feet in the air before toppling over.

Trump's pronounced anti-immigrant stance is reminiscent of both Le Pen in France and Orban in Hungary, although he is far from alone in taking such positions in much of today's Republican Party.

In comedy writing, a sitcom plot is basically the same thing: What's the worst thing that could happen? But you're playing it for comic effect. It's a similar muscle being used with Black Mirror.

It is vital that there is a narrator figure whom people believe. That's why I never do commercials. If I started saying that margarine was the same as motherhood, people would think I was a liar.

I think that the United States should be the leader, not only militarily. We need to stand for freedom; we need to stand for justice in the world, because there aren't too many countries that do.

Silence is an endangered quantity in our time... Silence, embraced, stuns with its presence, its pregnant reality—a reality that does not negate reason and argument, but puts them in their place.

Share This Page