The Jewish festival of freedom is the oldest continuously observed religious ritual in the world. Across the centuries Passover has never lost its power to inspire the imagination of successive generations of Jews with its annually re-enacted drama of slavery and liberation.

At the time when this famous historical battle was fought in Kosovo the people were looking at the stars expecting aid from them. Now six centuries later they are looking at the stars again waiting to conquer them.

Jews survived all the defeats expulsions persecutions and pogroms the centuries in which they were regarded as a pariah people even the Holocaust itself because they never gave up the faith that one day they would be free to live as Jews without fear.

We are now heading down a centuries-long path toward increasing the productivity of our natural capital - the resource systems upon which we depend to live - instead of our human capital.

We are living in 1937 and our universities I suggest are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization education graduation for a century - for several centuries.

For centuries the death penalty often accompanied by barbarous refinements has been trying to hold crime in check yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not as the law claims constant forces in a state of equilibrium.

Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as in our minds names do in the course of a year or two.

The hope and change the Democrats had in mind was nothing more than a retread of the failed and discredited socialist policies that have been the enemy of freedom for centuries all over the world. I fear America is teetering towards tyranny.

The Chinese government wants me to say that for many centuries Tibet has been part of China. Even if I make that statement many people would just laugh. And my statement will not change past history. History is history.

I read murder mysteries. I exercise 40 minutes a day. I watch videotapes while I exercise. I listen to audiotapes when I am in my car. And I try to stay in three different centuries.

Most people have no idea how to politely answer a phone. The English do and it's been their only major business advantage for the past two centuries.

We Americans are the best informed people on earth as to the events of the last twenty-four hours we are the not the best informed as the events of the last sixty centuries.

Throughout the centuries man has considered himself beautiful. I rather suppose that man only believes in his own beauty out of pride that he is not really beautiful and he suspects this himself for why does he look on the face of his fellow-man with such scorn?

I am little concerned with beauty or perfection. I don't care for the great centuries. All I care about is life struggle intensity.

Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.

In the first book of my Discworld series published more than 26 years ago I introduced Death as a character there was nothing particularly new about this - death has featured in art and literature since medieval times and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is unsurpassed at presenting more than 50 centuries of work. I go there constantly seeing things over and over better than I've ever seen them before.

I must try and break through the cliches about Latin America. Superpowers and other outsiders have fought over us for centuries in ways that have nothing to do with our problems. In reality we are all alone.