I refuse to accept that Western civilization is like some hopeless old version of Microsoft DOS, doomed to freeze, then crash. I still cling to the hope that the United States is the Mac to Europe's PC, and that if one part of the West can successfully update and reboot itself, it's America.

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

As a teacher, my strategy is to encourage questioning. I'm the least authoritarian professor you'll ever meet.

Oral history is a recipe for complete misrepresentation because almost no one tells the truth, even when they intend to.

The West may collapse very suddenly. Complex civilizations do that, because they operate, most of the time, on the edge of chaos.

If the financial system has a defect, it is that it reflects and magnifies what we human beings are like. Money amplifies our tendency to overreact, to swing from exuberance when things are going well to deep depression when they go wrong. Booms and busts are products, at root, of our emotional volatility.

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