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

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.

What you see is not what wee se. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.

I can't be around someone who is negative because I am such a positive person. If you are mean, then we don't speak.

I believe in kissing, kissing a lot.

We must recall the most important of humanity guidelines: Be polite. Being polite is possibly the greatest daily contribution everyone can make to life on Earth.

I felt rather exhausted, and wondered, rather shocked at my callous thought, why old people were sometimes such a strain. Worse than young children or puppies because one had to be polite.

I was a very bad student. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn't want to go farther in school. I hated school and was always the bad one; I was always insulting the teachers.

We are all going through some sort of struggle, so I try to keep that in mind when someone makes me angry. I also know that being positive is a choice, and I try to make that choice every day.

While the river of life glides along smoothly, it remains the same river; only the landscape on either bank seems to change.

Everyone wants something real, something that was created to invoke a positive feeling.

Me too." I agree fervently. "Every film should definitely have a message." Which is true. I mean... take the Lord of the Rings movies- they've got loads of messages. Like "Don't lose your ring.