It follows the seasons, beginning each year with the fond expectancy of springtime and ending with the hard facts of autumn.

When a documentary filmmaker, working in the style that I do, suggests that there has been a shooting ratio of 40 hours to every one hour of finished film, that doesn't mean that the other 39 are bad.

The flame is not out, but it is flickering.

Civics is in fact politics, and politics is how things work not only in the political realm but in every other realm. It may be this simple mechanical glitch that unites everything. This is my philosophy.

Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.

I'm a filmmaker. I'm an artist. I've chosen to work in history the way someone might choose to work in still lifes or landscapes.

The reason why you do history, and particularly why you do war, is that you want to make sure that in the next war, some lessons were learned. There's a saying: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Or Ecclesiastes: "What has been will be again. What has been done will be done again." Human nature always superimposes itself - its strength and its frailty over the rush of chaos of ongoing events - and we can perceive patterns and themes and motifs.