"You can learn as much about the history from reading about the present as you can vice versa, that is learning about the present through history, which is what I do for a living."

"I record all of my music with authentic instruments in a studio before we start editing, doing many, many versions. The music shapes the film as we edit so it has an organic relationship to the content."

"I have made a film about jazz that tries to look through jazz to see what it tells us about who we are as a people. I think that jazz is a spectacularly accurate model of democracy and a kind of look into our redemptive future possibilities."

"I think we too often make choices based on the safety of cynicism, and what we're lead to is a life not fully lived. Cynicism is fear, and it's worse than fear - it's active disengagement."

"Every scar carries the quiet memory of a battle faced and survived. For where clarity resides, peace inevitably follows — an essential principle for the reflective life."

"World War II had been such a tremendous success story for this country that the political and military leadership began to assume that they would prevail simply because of who they were. We were like the British at the turn of the 19th century."

"The Christian Bible is a symbolic book, not a literal one. The one Christians know as Jesus was actually a symbol for the sun. Ancient sun worshippers believed the sun died at the end of the winter solstice and then three days later it would be reborn at the start of its cycle - December 25."

"We are on the path to AGI, and it will be the most significant technological development in history."