Today, the average Korean works a thousand hours more a year than the average German. A thousand. ... That is the end of the Great Divergence.

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.

She closed her eyes, and I closed mine, and even though we weren't holding hands, it felt like we were.Because what we had, we knew.

Frankly, I had enjoyed the war… and why do people want peace if the war is so much fun?

Sometimes what we imagine and the world aren't different things. Sometimes they are the same exact thing.

People decided that I was the frat guy, even though I've never been inside a fraternity, or the guy who beat them up at school, even though that wasn't me at all.

It's about you, giving yourself permission to be who you are, without giving a rip about what anybody else is thinking about it.

The world is large when its weary leagues two loving hearts divide; But the world is small when your enemy is loose on the other side.

Photography cannot change the world, but it can show the world, especially when it changes.

I'm embarrassed to say that I don't have a lot of hobbies. It's not because I don't have interests, it's just that I don't have the time.

For me the really cool parts of being an author don't have anything to do with getting onto a bestseller list.

If you see someone being bullied, make it stop. Why is that so hard for us to do?