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Once you get to the Enlightenment, the way that powers get to be hyperpowers isn't just by conquest. It's through commerce and innovation. Societies like the Dutch Republic and the United States used tolerance to become a magnet for enterprising immigrants.

It strikes me there's a bunch of people in power who have really strong intentions of running the world and adjusting the world to exactly how they see it.

The world is not going into concentric blocs of power. It is actually going into a diffusion of power with more centres of decision-making than ever in human civilisation. That requires you to place yourself in far more hubs of power than ever before.

The most successful hyperpowers are the ones where there was actual intermixing. Tang dynasty China was China's golden age, and contrary to what I was told when I was growing up, Tang China was founded by a man who by today's standards was no more than half Chinese. It was a mixed-blood dynasty that pulled in 'barbarians' from the steppe.

The world is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours.

The world has become so complex that the idea of a power in which everything comes together and can be controlled in a centralized way is now erroneous.

Sometimes I think the world is divided into those who have a comfortable relationship with power and those who have a naturally adversarial relationship with power.

Even a superpower has limits.

Despite all of our efforts to control something, the world is much, much more powerful than us, and more deranged even than us.

There are people who have comfortable relationships with power and people with natural antagonism to power. I think it's easy to guess where I am in that.