"The great thing about behavioural psychology and economics is that they help us to see that there are actually pretty good reasons why human beings swing from greed to fear, and why we're not really calculating machines or utility-maximisers."

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

"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."

"We historians are increasingly using experimental psychology to understand the way we act. It is becoming very clear that our ability to evaluate risk is hedged by all sorts of cognitive biases. It's a miracle that we get anything right."

"I don't mind dating younger men now."

"I don't think of myself as hot or cool or anything, just a dork."

"It always makes me sad when I think of how I saw Wagner wasting his vitality, not only by singing their parts to some of his artists, but acting out the smallest details, and of how few they were who were responsive to his wishes."

"As you think, you travel, and as you love, you attract. You are today where your thoughts have brought you you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you."