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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

I can't imagine having a conversation about 'Celebrity Big Brother' in Cambridge, Massachusetts.