It's all very well for us to sit here in the west with our high incomes and cushy lives, and say it's immoral to violate the sovereignty of another state. But if the effect of that is to bring people in that country economic and political freedom, to raise their standard of living, to increase their life expectancy, then don't rule it out.

I think that it is important to be gregarious, and that friendships are not just a leisure pursuit, that they are an integral part of what it is to be human, and one does better work if one has a circle of friends that is active.

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

You really struggle to be a successful empire if you are also the world's biggest debtor.

In the old days it would have been a relatively simple matter to have checked Hitler's territorial ambitions. All you'd have needed would have been the 1914 combination of Britain, France and Russia. Indeed, if such an alliance had acted decisively to defend Czechoslovakia in 1938, Hitler might even have been overthrown by his own military. But it was not to be.

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

Between 1980 and 2000 the number of patents registered in Israel was 7652 compared with 367 for all the Arab countries combined.