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

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.

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.

In Stalin's Russia racial persecution was often disguised as class warfare. More than 1.5 million members of ethnic minorities died as a result of forced resettlement.

Scared and sacred are spelled with the same letters. Awful proceeds from the same root word as awesome. Terrify and terrific. Every negative experience holds the seed of transformation.

know one day, I will be gone.

There is no substitute for experience.

Those who try to combat the production of shoddy pictures are enemies of the best art today... It always feels tragic to see people labouring to saw off the branch they are sitting on.

What if compassion is also profitable? What if compassion is also good for business?

I love the very exposed, humorous, imperfect, never-trying to-pretend-to-be-perfect journey that I have been on in my life.

I'm a person who tries not to have regrets.

Think about what there is to learn from your heritage, good and bad, and about what you want to cultivate and not cultivate.

In the New York Times, you're going to get completely different information than you would in the USA Today.