Why did the Germans and Japanese keep fighting after 1943 when every rational hope of victory had disappeared?

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.

Sharks are the lions of the sea.They glamorize the oceanic glory.

Wallowing in the metaphorical mud of life helps pass time but doesn't really achieve much of any lasting value.

Take your eyes and your ears and your hands and your feet and your thoughts and your heart: Give them completely and unreservedly to Christ.

I’m very feminist in the way I look at the world, and that worldview must somehow be part of my work.

There is nothing better on a cold wintry day than a properly made pot pie.

I felt that I committed myself too much. I promised too much. But that way it's exciting.

Missionary work is but home teaching to those who are not now members of the Church, and home teaching is nothing more or less than missionary work to Church members

I pictured myself as a virus or a cancer cell and tried to sense what it would be like.

I want my kids to head out the door full of peace, not the echoes of my frustrations.

I am suspicious of what people might want from me. Do they like me, or my money?