If you spend a whole afternoon just eating popcorn and watching football, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. But if that's all you do, you get swept along with the tide, without any idea of where you're going.

Conventionally, one looks at history as something of the past. But after Einstein, who knows what is in the past and what is in the present?

If you spend a whole afternoon just eating popcorn and watching football, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. But if that's all you do, you get swept along with the tide, without any idea of where you're going.

Eventually, the tribe developed so much confidence in me that they invited me to be their chieftain.

I cannot forget a conversation that I had with an elderly couple from the tribe. They asked me whether I would kill them after I had finished. When I asked them why they asked that, they replied, Because you white men always do!

We're a strange animal, so often destroying what we love for selfish ends, and yet tantalized by the sense that there are other choices if only we had strength to make them. In the politics of 400 years ago, we find the same questions we battle with today.

The actor is concerned with his own bit of it, but the director's somehow trying to work the whole thing into a much bigger picture. It's like conducting an orchestra.