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

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

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

The rise of the West is, quite simply, the pre-eminent historical phenomenon of the second half of the second millennium after Christ.

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

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.

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.