When I first came to Oxford, I struggled to feel comfortable in an Anglican, public school-dominated institution.

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.

Be thankful for everything that happens in your life

A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.

Time' is the most threatening four letter word.

I say let Matteo Renzi work. He took over a country that was in disarray, not florid. And not the other way around.

Cricket is a game full or forlorn hopes and sudden dramatic changes of fortune and its rules are so ill-defined that their interpretation is partly an ethical business.

There are two types of people in the world, those who say 'there are two types of people in the world' and those who don't.

I’m not club-able, you see. I don’t like literary parties and literary gatherings and literary identities. I’d hate to join anything, however loosely.

O mysterious Night! thou art not silent; many tongues halt thou.

To pardon the oppressor is to deal harshly with the oppressed.

I keep thinking the bad guys will win in the end and take it all away, but somehow it all seems to keep working.