It is indeed a wondrous universal alchemy, is it not? When one's heartfelt intentions cause mountains to move.

It was Harry Patch, who was the last living World War I veteran; and by veteran I mean someone who actually fought in the war, he didn't just happen to be in the army at that time, in the Great War. And when the Iraq War started, he was interviewed, and they said, well what do you think of this? And he said, in a very sad voice, "Well, that's why my mates died. We thought we were going to end all that sort of thing."

if the way ahead is not clear, time is often the best editor of one's intentions.

Im a storyteller; that is what I do. And Im particularly interested in history; and in history of a certain era. But what is interesting for me is how many, how many things you see repeated.

a question has the most power before we rush to answer it, when it is still making us think, still testing us.

It is indeed a wondrous universal alchemy, is it not? When one's heartfelt intentions cause mountains to move.

As Churchill said about the Great War, and he said this in about 1924, that it was the first war in which man realized that he could obliterate himself completely. If you consider the way the whole world was impacted, 18 million people worldwide died, and that is taking into account military and civilian deaths: 18 million people. And it was the whole world, if you will. You know, many of those trenches were dug by Chinese. There are photographs of Chinese looking like they just came from China, with their hats and so on, digging the trenches, right from the beginning.