Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
President Obama's biggest weakness is weakness.
The ascent of money has been essential to the ascent of man.
To make a living space, there first had to be a killing space.
The law of unintended consequences is the only real law of history.
I have three kids in Britain, and I am there at least once a month.
A historian is battling all the time to remember as much as possible.
Through pure accident of birth, I've managed to stay relatively youthful.
Only in England would 'professor gets divorced and remarried' be a story.
I would say I'm a 19th-century liberal, possibly even an 18th-century one.
There aren't many people who really put their life on the line for human freedom.
No civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear to itself, is indestructible.
In the financial sector, those whom the gods want to destroy they first teach math.
The Armenian genocide showed what could happen when empires were beaten into nations.
When bond prices fall, interest rates soar, with painful consequences for all borrowers.
You really struggle to be a successful empire if you are also the world's biggest debtor.
I can't imagine having a conversation about 'Celebrity Big Brother' in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
If being rightwing is thinking that Karl Marx's doctrine was a catastrophe for humanity, then I'm rightwing.
As a teacher, my strategy is to encourage questioning. I'm the least authoritarian professor you'll ever meet.
Why did the Germans and Japanese keep fighting after 1943 when every rational hope of victory had disappeared?
When I first came to Oxford, I struggled to feel comfortable in an Anglican, public school-dominated institution.
Oral history is a recipe for complete misrepresentation because almost no one tells the truth, even when they intend to.
The Japanese Co-Prosperity Zone began as a racist utopia and ended as a cross between an abbatoir, a plantation and a brothel.
Between 1980 and 2000 the number of patents registered in Israel was 7652 compared with 367 for all the Arab countries combined.
The West may collapse very suddenly. Complex civilizations do that, because they operate, most of the time, on the edge of chaos.
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.
The rise of the West is, quite simply, the pre-eminent historical phenomenon of the second half of the second millennium after Christ.
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 was never a very convincing social conservative, and always avoided associating myself with that part of the broader conservative movement.
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.
One of the main arguments that I make in my new book, 'The Great Degeneration,' is that the rule of law in the U.S. is becoming the rule of lawyers.
My fundamental tenets are concerned with freedom of the individual; the market isn't perfect, but it's the best available way of allocating resources.
It's great to see countries like China and India lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty by essentially copying Western ways of doing things.
Something that's seldom appreciated about me is that I am in sympathy with a great deal of what Marx wrote, except that I'm on the side of the bourgeoisie.
I think the rise of quantitative econometrics and a highly mathematical approach to risk management was the obverse of a decline in interest in financial history.
Collaboration is risky. If it fails, if the occupation is wound up prematurely and the bad guys come back to power, you might find yourself in some serious trouble.
In Stalin's Russia racial persecution was often disguised as class warfare. More than 1.5 million members of ethnic minorities died as a result of forced resettlement.
What's so seductive about the efficient markets hypothesis is that it applies nine years out of ten. A lot of the time it works. But when it stops working, you blow up.
Civilisation is partly about restraining the male of the species from engaging in the violence of the hunter-gatherer period. But it doesn't take an awful lot to unleash it.
The real point of me isn't that I'm good looking. It's that I'm clever. I've got a brain! I would rather be called a highly intelligent historian than a gorgeous pouting one.
Risk models are a substitute for historical knowledge, because they tend to work with just three years' worth of data. But three years is not a long time in financial history.
It's not surprising so many people end up with credit-card debts. Saving for your retirement and buying a house are difficult things, and we don't educate people about them at all.
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 whole point about historians is that we are really communing with the dead. It's very restful - because you read. There's some sociopathic problem that makes me prefer it to human interaction.
From the earliest days, the Rothschilds appreciated the importance of proximity to politicians, the men who determined not only the extent of budget deficits but also the domestic and foreign policies.
The debate that I'm interested in having is with seriously smart people about how we design institutions in the 21st century that will genuinely address problems of poverty and educational underachievement.
My arguments for liberal empire or whatever you want to call it - hegemony, primacy, you name it - are really activated by a sense that the alternatives involve more violence, more repression, more hardship.
So much of liberalism in its classical sense is taken for granted in the west today and even disrespected. We take freedom for granted, and because of this we don't understand how incredibly vulnerable it is.
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.
I think the condition of imperial denial is a handicap because if you do not recognize that you are essentially performing the functions of an empire, you are incapable of learning from the mistakes of past empires.
As a financial historian, I was quite isolated in Oxford - British historians are supposed to write about kings - so the quality of intellectual life in my field is much higher at Harvard. The students work harder there.