Top 100 Niall Ferguson Quotes

#1. Known to the Chinese as 'Iron-Headed Old Rat

Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson Quotes #43205
#2. 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.

Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson Quotes #70035
#3. 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.

Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson Quotes #119259
#4. Over time, the welfare state has become dysfunctional in a surprising way. But in a way it became a victim of its own success: It became so successful at prolonging life, that it becomes financially unsustainable, unless you make major changes to things like retirement ages.

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#5. Today, banking assets (that is, loans) in the world's major economies are equivalent to around 150 per cent of those countries' combined GDP.

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

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#7. In general, I have felt more at home in the U.S. than I ever felt in England.

Niall Ferguson

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#8. I refuse to accept that Western civilization is like some hopeless old version of Microsoft DOS, doomed to freeze, then crash. I still cling to the hope that the United States is the Mac to Europe's PC, and that if one part of the West can successfully update and reboot itself, it's America.

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#9. 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.

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#10. 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.

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Niall Ferguson Quotes #206177
#11. There can be no understanding without that sympathy which puts us, through the imagination, and (another's) situation.

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#12. In the Philippines, formalizing home ownership was until recently a 168-step process involving fifty-three public and private agencies and taking between thirteen and twenty-five years.

Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson Quotes #231580
#13. Currency peg can mean higher volatility in short-term interest rates, as the central bank seeks to keep the price of its money steady in terms of the peg. It can mean deflation, if the supply of the peg is constrained (as the supply of gold was relative to the demand for it in the 1870s and 1880s).

Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson Quotes #234741
#14. I, the British Empire began as a primarily economic phenomenon, its growth powered by commerce and consumerism. The demand for sugar drew merchants tot he carribean. British were not the first Empire builders. They were IMERIAL IMMITATORS!

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#15. Figures must be adjusted downwards to take account of the cost of living, which has risen by a factor of nearly seven in my lifetime.

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#16. I have three kids in Britain, and I am there at least once a month.

Niall Ferguson

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#17. News of the Indian Mutiny had taken forty-six days to reach London in 1857, travelling at an effective speed of 3.8 miles an hour. News of the huge Nobi earthquake in Japan in 1891 took a single day, travelling at 246 miles an hour, sixty-five times faster.50

Niall Ferguson

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#18. The thinkers in their youth are almost always very lonely creatures. . . . The university most worthy of rational admiration is that one in which your lonely thinker can feel himself least lonely, most positively furthered and most richly fed. - WILLIAM JAMES1

Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson Quotes #330502
#19. The idea was to reinvent mortgages by bundling thousands of them together as the backing for new and alluring securities that could be sold as alternatives to traditional government and corporate bonds - in short, to convert mortgages into bonds.

Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson Quotes #363663
#20. When I first came to Oxford, I struggled to feel comfortable in an Anglican, public school-dominated institution.

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Niall Ferguson Quotes #396339
#21. Without easy credit creation a true bubble cannot occur. That is why so many bubbles have their origins in the sins of omission or commission of central banks.

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#22. 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.

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#23. Through pure accident of birth, I've managed to stay relatively youthful.

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#24. The success of a civilization is measured not just in its aesthetic achievements but also, and surely more importantly, in the duration and quality of life of its citizens.

Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson Quotes #413867
#25. Between 1980 and 2000 the number of patents registered in Israel was 7652 compared with 367 for all the Arab countries combined. In 2008 alone is really inventors applied to register 9591 new patents. The equivalent figure for Iran was 50 and for all majority Muslim countries in the world with 5657.

Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson Quotes #418060
#26. An increase in the supply of paper money, and hence a decrease in the purchasing power of the currencies in which most bonds were denominated. A rational investor who anticipated a major war would sell bonds in anticipation of these effects.

Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson Quotes #429063
#27. Japan. So successful was the Japanese 'welfare superpower' that by the 1970s life expectancy in Japan had become the longest in the world. But that, combined with a falling birth rate, has produced the world's oldest society, with more than 21 per cent of the population already over the age of 65.

Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson Quotes #437798
#28. 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.

Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson Quotes #449053
#29. The result is one of the greatest paradoxes of modern history: that an economic system designed to offer infinite choice to the individual has ended up homogenizing humanity.

Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson Quotes #453194
#30. 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.

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#31. Between a half and two-thirds of all Europeans who migrated to North America between 1650 and 1780 did so under contracts of indentured servitude;

Niall Ferguson

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#32. Some S&Ls bet their depositors' money on highly dubious projects. Many simply stole it, as if deregulation meant that the law no longer applied to them.

Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson Quotes #538259
#33. it was said to be 'hardly in the power of liquor to affect Dr Webster's understanding or his limbs'. Yet no one was more sober when it came to calculations of life expectancy.

Niall Ferguson

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#34. the Bank's proper role in a crisis as the 'lender of last resort', to lend freely, albeit at a penalty rate, to combat liquidity crises.42

Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson Quotes #580072
#35. Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, readies, the where-withal: call it what you like, money matters.

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

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#37. There aren't many people who really put their life on the line for human freedom.

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#38. Only in England would 'professor gets divorced and remarried' be a story.

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Niall Ferguson Quotes #612462
#39. The Japanese experience, when a conscious effort by the central bank to prick an asset bubble ended up triggering an 80 per cent stock market sell-off and a decade of economic stagnation.

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Niall Ferguson Quotes #626136
#40. Not the last time in Western history, the revolutionaries armed themselves with a new religion to steel themselves for greater outrageous.

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Niall Ferguson Quotes #688803
#41. 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.

Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson Quotes #708712
#42. there really is no such thing as 'the future', singular. There are only multiple, unforeseeable futures, which will never lose their capacity to take us by surprise.

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#43. After 1968 the restored communist regime required all Czech rock musicians to sit a written exam in Marxism Leninism

Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson Quotes #720152
#44. Why, to give another suggestive example, did it take an American journalist sixty-five days to get official permission (including, after a wait of up to five weeks, a Food

Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson Quotes #752194
#45. Bonds, as we saw in Chapter 2, are no more than promises by governments to pay interest and ultimately repay principal over a specified period of time. Either through default or through currency depreciation, many governments have failed to honour those promises.

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#46. A chaos so great and so obscure that nothing about it can be known'.

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#47. The reality, then, was that Indian nationalism was fuelled not by the impoverishment of the many but by the rejection of the privileged few.

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#48. 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.

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#49. Americans could once boast proudly that their system set the benchmark for the world; the United States was the rule of law. But now what we see is the rule of lawyers, which is something different.

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

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#51. The bacteriologist, often risking his life to find cures for lethal afflictions, was another kind of imperial hero, as brave in his way as the soldier-explorer.

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Niall Ferguson Quotes #923346
#52. striving to be a master of the universe

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Niall Ferguson Quotes #925053
#53. The second hallmark of the stationary state was the ability of a corrupt and monopolistic elite to exploit the system of law and administration to their own advantage: In a country too, where, though the rich or the owners of large capitals enjoy a good deal of security, the

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#54. To make a living space, there first had to be a killing space.

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#55. Institutions or products of culture. But they formalize a set of norms.

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#56. 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.

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Niall Ferguson Quotes #1022683
#57. I would say I'm a 19th-century liberal, possibly even an 18th-century one.

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Niall Ferguson Quotes #1037797
#58. The crisis prompted the issue of emergency paper money: in Britain, £1 and 10s Treasury notes; in the United States, the emergency currency that banks were authorized to issue under the Aldrich-Vreeland Act of 1908.46 Then, as now, the authorities reacted to a liquidity crisis by printing money.

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#59. I was never a very convincing social conservative, and always avoided associating myself with that part of the broader conservative movement.

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#60. The subprime butterfly had flapped its wings and triggered a global hurricane.

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#61. 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.

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#62. If being rightwing is thinking that Karl Marx's doctrine was a catastrophe for humanity, then I'm rightwing.

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#63. 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.

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

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#65. In the 1990s the world's population for the first time exceeded six billion, more than three times what it had been when the First World War broke out.

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#66. 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.

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#67. Today 350 million people speak English as their first language and around 450 million have it as a second language. That is roughly one in every seven people on the planet.

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#68. The English language is the one thing the Commonwealth still has in common.

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#69. 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.

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#70. We should not delude ourselves into thinking that our historical narratives, as commonly constructed, are anything more than retrofits.

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Niall Ferguson Quotes #1261083
#71. In particular, it lacked the skills to carry out pacification effectively - or as Kissinger politely put it, the special qualities developed in a decade or more of combat training do not include discriminating political judgment in volatile and complex circumstances.

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#72. Oral history is a recipe for complete misrepresentation because almost no one tells the truth, even when they intend to.

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

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#74. bear in mind when trying to compare housing with other forms of capital asset. The first is depreciation. Stocks do not wear out and require new roofs; houses do. The second is liquidity. As assets, houses are a great deal more expensive to convert into cash than stocks. The third is volatility.

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#75. money: a unit of account, a store of value - portable power.

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#76. It was misconceived because Johnson appeared to think the kind of tactics that worked in a Texas saloon would work in Vietnam: beat a man, then stop beating him and say, Give in, or I'll beat you some more.

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#77. achievement to create the first modern insurance fund, based on correct actuarial and financial principles, rather than mercantile gambling.

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#78. The Crusades, like the conquests that followed, were as much about overcoming Europe's monetary shortage as about converting heathens to Christianity.14

Niall Ferguson

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#79. Inflation has come down partly because many of the items we buy, from clothes to computers, have got cheaper as a result of technological innovation and the relocation of production to low-wage economies in Asia.

Niall Ferguson

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#80. no man prepar'd for it; no man consider'd it would come like a Thief in the night, exactly as it happens in the case of death.'74

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#81. It is hard to believe that Gladstone would have ordered the invasion of Egypt in 1882 if the Egyptian government had not threatened to renege on its obligations to European bondholders, himself among them.

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#82. When bond prices fall, interest rates soar, with painful consequences for all borrowers.

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#83. I can't think of anything I would rather do with my money than buy my children the best possible education.

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Niall Ferguson Quotes #1507373
#84. they sought, from their earliest days, to use their financial leverage over individual states to improve the legal and political position of the Jews living there.

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#85. 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.

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#86. the air was filled with obscure ideas

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Niall Ferguson Quotes #1517075
#87. Nowadays he is best remembered for the Fibonacci sequence of numbers (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 . . .), in which each successive number is the sum of the previous two, and the ratio between a number and its immediate antecedent tends towards a 'golden mean' (around 1.618). It

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#88. Edsel Ford, son of the firm's founder Henry,

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#89. President Obama's biggest weakness is weakness.

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#90. The Boxers believed that after one hundred days of training in martial arts they would be impervious to bullets. After three hundred days they would be able to fly.

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#91. 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.

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#92. 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.

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#93. Africa is in fact a more Christian continent than Europe. There are now, for example, more Anglicans in Nigeria than in England.

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#94. 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 ...

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#95. Jews were emphatically second-class subjects of the Tsar. A Pale of Settlement, outside which Jews were not supposed to reside, had been established by Catherine II in 1791, though it was not precisely delineated until 1835. It consisted of Russian-controlled Poland

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Niall Ferguson Quotes #1756440
#96. Between economic freedom and government regulation? Chapter 2 will address these issues. The specific question I ask is how far very complex regulation has become the disease of which it purports to be the cure, distorting and corrupting both the political and the economic process.

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Niall Ferguson Quotes #1772667
#97. Elias Canetti once tried to imagine a world in which 'all weapons [were] abolished and in the next war only biting [was] allowed'. Can we be sure there would be no genocides in such a radically disarmed world?

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#98. The Emperor and his ministers might dance Western dances and even, in violation of traditional Japanese propriety, smile Western smiles. But their underlying and deadly earnest aim was always to wipe the smiles off European faces.

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#99. Although the court recognizes his right to insist on his bond - to claim his pound of flesh - the law also prohibits him from shedding Antonio's blood.

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#100. The British welfare state, it seemed, had removed the incentives without which a capitalist economy simply could not function: the carrot of serious money for those who strove, the stick of hardship for those who slacked.

Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson Quotes #1823637

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