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.

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.

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

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

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

For 500 years the West patented six killer applications that set it apart. The first to download them was Japan. Over the last century, one Asian country after another has downloaded these killer apps- competition, modern science, the rule of law and private property rights, modern medicine, the consumer society and the work ethic. Those six things are the secret sauce of Western civilization.

The law of unintended consequences is the only real law of history.