A historian is battling all the time to remember as much as possible.

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.

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 Armenian genocide showed what could happen when empires were beaten into nations.

It’s our generation that is witnessing the end of Western predominance. The average American used to be more than 20 times richer than the average Chinese. Now it’s just five times, and soon it will be 2.5 times.

I think the condition of imperial denial is a handicap because if you do not recognize that you are essentially performing the functions of an empire, you are incapable of learning from the mistakes of past empires.