Don't kid yourself. President Obama's decision to withdraw 33 000 troops from Afghanistan before he stands for reelection is not driven by the United States' 'position of strength' in the war zone as much as it is by grim economic and political realities at home.

Stand-up is like a movie every night. You write it direct it produce it the audience votes and you go home. There's nothing more satisfying.

In the theatre people talk. Talk talk until the cows come home about journeys of discovery and about what Hazlitt thought of a line of Shakespeare. I can't stand it.

It's not a bad thing for a writer not to feel at home. Writers - we're much more comfortable at parties standing in the corner watching everybody else having a good time than we are mingling.

There's no real preparing at home for stand-up. You just go and you just do it.

I stand before you as the governor of Texas but also stand before you the son of two tenant farmers. Ray Perry who came home after 35 bombing missions over Europe to work his little corner of land out there and Amelia who made sure that my sister Milla and I had everything that we needed included hand sewing my clothes until I went off to college.

Major league baseball has asked its players to stop tossing baseballs into the stands during games because they say fans fight over them and they get hurt. In fact the Florida Marlins said that's why they never hit any home runs. It's a safety issue.

I remember when I was a kid watching my mother jam herself into her girdle - a piece of equipment so rigid it could stand up on its own - and I remember her coming home from fancy parties and racing upstairs to extricate herself from its cruel iron grip.

So I'm more at home with my backpack sleeping in a hotel room or on a bus or on an airplane than I am necessarily on a bed. It's weird being here. It feels like I'm standing next to my real life.

The more one does and sees and feels the more one is able to do and the more genuine may be one's appreciation of fundamental things like home and love and understanding companionship.

Any woman who understands the problems of running a home will be nearer to understanding the problems of running a country.

In a country like France so ancient their history is full of outstanding people so they carry a heavy weight on their back. Who could write in French after Proust or Flaubert?

I have a long-standing history of respecting artists' wishes.

The 4th Amendment and the personal rights it secures have a long history. At the very core stands the right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion.

I don't really think of things in terms of legacy or where I stand in the history of Nintendo or anything like that.

Nowhere else in history has there ever been a flag that stands for the right to burn itself. This is the fractal of our flag. It stands for the right to destroy itself.

The history of Christianity therefore must be of concern to all who are interested in the record of man and particularly to all who seek to understand the contemporary human scene.

If you take a look at history you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards in order to express this idea.

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.

I'm a person that just likes to speak the truth and I don't understand why in America it's such a big deal that we won't read the Koran and we won't look at history.

In many ways history is marked as 'before' and 'after' Rosa Parks. She sat down in order that we all might stand up and the walls of segregation came down.

The advantages found in history seem to be of three kinds as it amuses the fancy as it improves the understanding and as it strengthens virtue.

I am totally fascinated by people and our history as I understand and continue to explore it. People have so much to give and so far to go and yet we have given and gone a great distance. It's really just interesting to ask: why not? And see where that takes me.

'WASP' is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class apart from redneck which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata so it's inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way that the other hyphenations just are not.