Collaboration is risky. If it fails, if the occupation is wound up prematurely and the bad guys come back to power, you might find yourself in some serious trouble.

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.

Success doesn't teach as many lessons as failure

You have to promote yourself you have to have this smile on your face all the time and be this nice guy - which I am!

I don't have a problem rhyming "bar" with "car" - I do it all the time - but sometimes it doesn't feel right.

A bird who can gobble is qualified to teach crowing.

Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.

I am not against Israel, I am against Zionists.

We’ve always been involved with issues that deal with the fundamental human rights of people, whether that means the right to political freedom or the right to breathe air that’s clean.

Be loving towards yourself, then you will be able to love others too.

Pressure is what you make of it. It makes me play harder.

No Marxist can deny that the interests of socialism are higher than the interests of the right of nations to self-determination.