We, Britain and Germany, can neither of us be happy about our handling of the Iraq war.

There is no consensus even today on the merits of Napoleon - and certainly no agreement on the rights and wrongs of the origins of the First World War.

Men like Hitler and Stalin and their immediate lieutenants cannot plead in defence of their actions that these were justified by the accepted values of that time.

Prison is an expensive way of making bad people worse.

Margaret Thatcher, growing up in a bombed and battered Britain, derived a distrust which has grown with the years not just of Germany but of all continental Europe.

It is normal for politicians in all countries to profess themselves the pupils of history, anxious to draw the right lessons from her teaching.

History provides no precise guidelines.

But Germany will always suffer, I fear, from the intensely dramatic character of the crimes of the Third Reich.

We should be wary of politicians who profess to follow history while only noticing those signposts of history that point in the direction which they themselves already favour.

We must admit that history is enjoyable to a large extent because it enables us to pass judgment on the past.

The tragedy of 9/11 galvanised the American superpower into action, leaving us in Europe divided in its wake.

The more we're thrown into conflict with each other through engineered distrust, the less able we are to unite against those responsible.

For once I want the beat louder than my mind.

Memory, even in the rest of us, is a shifting, fading, partial thing, a net that doesn’t catch all the fish by any means and sometimes catches butterflies that don’t.

I love my accent, I thought it was useful in Gone In 60 Seconds because the standard villain is upper class or Cockney. My Northern accent would be an odd clash opposite Nic Cage.

What is learned without pleasure is forgotten without remorse.

TV has a lot of problems, but I think the Internet and social media have a lot more. Under the cover of anonymity people say the most vicious things.

I've always tried to really focus on The Hunger Games movie, knowing that, yes, these are amazing books and I would feel like a failure, if I didn't get all three of them made.

I think spirituality is a good thing but I dislike any sort of dogmatic organization.

When two people dream the same dream, it ceases to be an illusion.

If you can't be proud of what you do, go and sell shoes. Do something else.