Between 1980 and 2000 the number of patents registered in Israel was 7652 compared with 367 for all the Arab countries combined.

The law of unintended consequences is the only real law of history.

The ascent of money has been essential to the ascent of man.

As a teacher, my strategy is to encourage questioning. I'm the least authoritarian professor you'll ever meet.

The West may collapse very suddenly. Complex civilizations do that, because they operate, most of the time, on the edge of chaos.

To make a living space, there first had to be a killing space.

All empires have depended on local legitimacy and local collaboration; they are not based primarily on coercion. An imperial rule that relies wholly on coercion can't endure. It's too expensive.

The British press has an insatiable appetite for making public things that should be private. It's a prurience that I've never understood.

I can't imagine having a conversation about 'Celebrity Big Brother' in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Armenian genocide showed what could happen when empires were beaten into nations.

If young men have jobs - or the prospects of jobs - they are less likely to take up arms, they are less likely to join the resistance.

Do not be victim of life-negative religions. Be respectful to life, love and beauty.

He imagined forgiveness was like flying, that it made you soar. He imagined that it looked like an eagle, a silver bolt in the sky, that it was pure light.

Patience is a muscle you need to exercise or you will lose it.

Once you say you're going to settle for second, that's what happens to you in life.

Find a faster way to fail, recover, and try again.

Blind in the eye, so I see you with my heart

...photography is made essentially of time. I often think that what we show is a point in time, more than a window onto space.

In the 21st Century, the capacity to communicate will almost certainly be a key human right.

Maybe I was naive, but I thought the whole point of being an MP was to scrutinise legislation and improve it.

It is doubtful that the government knows much more than the public does about how government [Economic] policies will work.