When bond prices fall, interest rates soar, with painful consequences for all borrowers.

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

The ascent of money has been essential to the ascent of man.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

If young men have jobs - or the prospects of jobs - they are less likely to take up arms, they are less likely to join the resistance.

Distressed Hearts Have Similar Vibrations.

Change is not made without inconvenience even from worse to better.

An age builds up cities: an hour destroys them.

Happiness needs one-upmanship.

The extras are a nice bonus feature, but the main incentive is the musical experience.

The man who sees an opportunity and does nothing is asleep with his eyes open.

My stories are very compact. I want them to say the most complex things in the simplest way.

There are those who are trying to create an anti-business culture in Britain - and we have to stop them. At stake are not pay packages for a few but jobs and prosperity for the many.

A zen couch potato is a person who contemplates the nature of televised existence.

I am reckless, yes, but not thoughtless