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

The British press has an insatiable appetite for making public things that should be private. It's a prurience that I've never understood.

The ascent of money has been essential to the ascent of man.

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.

To make a living space, there first had to be a killing space.

My arguments for liberal empire or whatever you want to call it - hegemony, primacy, you name it - are really activated by a sense that the alternatives involve more violence, more repression, more hardship.

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.