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

The dead outnumber the living fourteen to one, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril

I wrote this book because I had formed a strong impression that the people currently living were paying insufficient attention to the dead.

Historians are not scientists. They cannot (and should not even trying to) establish universal laws of social or political "physics" with reliable predictive powers. Why? Because there is no possibility of repeating the single, multi-millennium experiment that constant to the past. The sample size of human history is one.

The biggest threat to Western civilization is posed not by other civilizations, but by our own pusillanimity — and by the historical ignorance that feeds it.

Why did the Germans and Japanese keep fighting after 1943 when every rational hope of victory had disappeared?

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.

The Japanese Co-Prosperity Zone began as a racist utopia and ended as a cross between an abbatoir, a plantation and a brothel.

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