There are signs that the age of petroleum has passed its zenith. Adjusted for inflation, a barrel of crude oil now sells for three times its long-run average. The large western oil companies, which cartellised the industry for much of the 20th century, are now selling more oil than they find, and are thus in the throes of liquidation.

Europe and North America, we are told, are less dependent on energy-intensive heavy industry than in the 1960s and 1970s. It seems we squeeze more GDP out of a barrel of oil than in those benighted days.

Suicidal violence is not the exclusive property of the Muslim world. Suicide bombings were a tactic of nationalist struggles in 19th-century Europe and Russia, the far east during the second world war and the Vietnam war, and in modern Sri Lanka.

Bulls don't read. Bears read financial history. As markets fall to bits, the bears dust off the Dutch tulip mania of 1637, the Banque Royale of 1719-20, the railway speculation of the 1840s, the great crash of 1929.

For 50 years, nuclear power stations have produced three products which only a lunatic could want: bomb-explosive plutonium, lethal radioactive waste and electricity so dear it has to be heavily subsidised. They leave to future generations the task, and most of the cost, of making safe sites that have been polluted half-way to eternity.

Viewed from a distance, or through the eye of the All-Knowing CEO of the Universe, the crash of 2008 followed the usual pattern. A long-lived boom driven by cheap credit, going back as far as 1982 (though subject to interruptions in the mid-1980s and 1990s, and in 2001), came to grief because of a rise in the cost of borrowing money.

Rarely in modern times has there been such a revolution in commercial sentiment as occurred in 2008, or such a display in government and business of panic and helplessness.

An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support.

When William the Conqueror commissioned a great survey of his English realm at Gloucester in 1085, the result was a work so thorough, fair, dispassionate, and wide-ranging that it seemed to the succeeding generations to have come from another world.

Up until the Depression, recession had a moral character: it was supposed to purge the body economic of the greed and excess that attends a business expansion.

We read too much Shakespeare at school, and view our parliamentary politics as dynastic drama, in which an impatient crown prince frets at his long subordination and begins to scheme for the throne he knows he merits, was promised and has earned.

Financial crises are like fireworks: they illuminate the sky even as they go pop.

A century ago, petroleum - what we call oil - was just an obscure commodity; today it is almost as vital to human existence as water.

I have not worked with farmers. I have not worked with prisoners. I have only worked with human beings. I didn't see anybody as anything other than that.

If you don't take yourself seriously, you will die joyfully. If you take yourself seriously, you will go through a lot of misery.

There is no good leader. First of all, if you think you are a leader, you are just messed up in your head. People should think you are a leader. If you think you are a big success, again, you are messed up. Other people should think you are a success.

There are no problems in the world. There are just situations. Some situations you know how to handle. Some you do not know how to handle.

Golf is basically about geometry and your ability to gauge how things are, the terrain, the distances, and exerting the right amount of swing and force.

If you have physical ailments, you will get everyone's compassion, but when you have a mental ailment, you will get laughter, unfortunately. This is because it is very difficult to make out when somebody is sick and when somebody is being stupid.

Being mentally ill is not a joke. It is a most painful thing.

If you don't have very strong emotions or very intense thoughts about something, you cannot get depressed.

Yoga is not Indian; it does not belong to India.

Yoga is not a belief system - it is not a new religion, philosophy or a teaching but a technology. I call it a technology because you don't have to believe it; you just have to learn to use it. It does not matter what your religion is, what your colour is, what your race is, or where you come from. If you learn to use yoga, it works for you.

When there is a choice, it is best to eat live vegetarian food. 'Live' means in its uncooked condition, because a live cell has everything in itself to sustain life. The idea is to take life into you. When we cook food, it destroys the life in it.