Top 100 Niall Ferguson Quotes
#1. Niall Ferguson is an intellectual fraud whose job, for years, has been to impress dumb, rich Americans with his accent and flatter them with his writings.
Alex Pareene
#2. I was just looking at moving to Cambridge, and a house I was looking at cost a million dollars. Because somehow, that's what a house costs. And I was thinking, "How can it be?" And I was thinking, "What am I doing? Am I going to be Niall Ferguson, that horrible man?
Jamaica Kincaid
#4. As early as 1975 she had come up with a wonderful line about the Labour Party: They've got the usual Socialist disease - they've run out of other people's money.
Niall Ferguson
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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.
Niall Ferguson
#8. Today, banking assets (that is, loans) in the world's major economies are equivalent to around 150 per cent of those countries' combined GDP.
Niall Ferguson
#9. I wrote this book because I had formed a strong impression that the people currently living were paying insufficient attention to the dead.
Niall Ferguson
#10. In general, I have felt more at home in the U.S. than I ever felt in England.
Niall Ferguson
#11. 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.
Niall Ferguson
#12. 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.
Niall Ferguson
#13. 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.
Niall Ferguson
#14. We must resist the temptation to romanticize history's losers.
Niall Ferguson
#15. There can be no understanding without that sympathy which puts us, through the imagination, and (another's) situation.
Niall Ferguson
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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!
Niall Ferguson
#19. I can't imagine having a conversation about 'Celebrity Big Brother' in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Niall Ferguson
#20. 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.
Niall Ferguson
#21. Inflation', wrote Milton Friedman in a famous definition, 'is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, in the sense that it cannot occur without a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.
Niall Ferguson
#22. I have three kids in Britain, and I am there at least once a month.
Niall Ferguson
#23. agencies began to downgrade scores of RMBS CDOs (short for 'residential mortgage-backed security collateralized debt obligations', the very term testifying to the over-complex nature of these products).
Niall Ferguson
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. The 1789 Revolution had given the French a political script of unequalled drama. For the better part of the following century the temptation to reenact the play was irresistible.
Niall Ferguson
#27. The Japanese Co-Prosperity Zone began as a racist utopia and ended as a cross between an abbatoir, a plantation and a brothel.
Niall Ferguson
#28. 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
#29. When I first came to Oxford, I struggled to feel comfortable in an Anglican, public school-dominated institution.
Niall Ferguson
#30. 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.
Niall Ferguson
#31. 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.
Niall Ferguson
#32. the medieval contract known as the census, which allowed one party to buy a stream of annual payments from another.
Niall Ferguson
#33. Through pure accident of birth, I've managed to stay relatively youthful.
Niall Ferguson
#34. The real social contract, (Edmund Burke) argued, was not Rousseau's social contract between the noble savage and the General Will, but a "partnership" between the present generation and future generations.
Niall Ferguson
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. The rise of the West is, quite simply, the pre-eminent historical phenomenon of the second half of the second millennium after Christ.
Niall Ferguson
#42. No one can know the future, least of all, a historian, whose business is the past.
Niall Ferguson
#43. 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.
Niall Ferguson
#44. 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
#45. The German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, was one of the few authentic geniuses among nineteenth-century statesmen.
Niall Ferguson
#46. 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
#47. Without the spread of British rule around the world, it is hard to believe that the structures of liberal capitalism would have been so successfully established in so many different economies around the world.
Niall Ferguson
#48. No civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear to itself, is indestructible.
Niall Ferguson
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, readies, the where-withal: call it what you like, money matters.
Niall Ferguson
#52. The ascent of money has been essential to the ascent of man.
Niall Ferguson
#53. There aren't many people who really put their life on the line for human freedom.
Niall Ferguson
#54. Only in England would 'professor gets divorced and remarried' be a story.
Niall Ferguson
#55. I think that it is important to be gregarious, and that friendships are not just a leisure pursuit, that they are an integral part of what it is to be human, and one does better work if one has a circle of friends that is active.
Niall Ferguson
#56. 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.
Niall Ferguson
#57. Only general officers were entitled to know our true rank. To all others our standard reply to the inevitable question, "What is your rank?" was simply a firm, "My rank is confidential, but at this moment I am not outranked."39
Niall Ferguson
#58. So much of liberalism in its classical sense is taken for granted in the west today and even disrespected. We take freedom for granted, and because of this we don't understand how incredibly vulnerable it is.
Niall Ferguson
#59. In the financial sector, those whom the gods want to destroy they first teach math.
Niall Ferguson
#60. The final National Strategic Target List specified 1,050 Designated Ground Zeros (DGZs) for nuclear weapons, including 151 urban-industrial assets. Even the minimal version of the plan envisioned 650 DGZs being hit by over 1,400 weapons with a total yield of 2,100 megatons.
Niall Ferguson
#61. Just as Hitler had predicted, it was rival empires more than indigenous nationalists who propelled the process of decolonization forward.
Niall Ferguson
#62. Even today, you can still see the empty lots that the riots left in their wake.
Niall Ferguson
#63. Not the last time in Western history, the revolutionaries armed themselves with a new religion to steel themselves for greater outrageous.
Niall Ferguson
#64. 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
#65. happiest and the most comfortable. It is hard in the stationary, and miserable in the declining state. The progressive state is in reality the cheerful and the hearty state to all the different orders of the society. The stationary is dull; the declining melancholy.
Niall Ferguson
#66. 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.
Niall Ferguson
#67. After 1968 the restored communist regime required all Czech rock musicians to sit a written exam in Marxism Leninism
Niall Ferguson
#68. 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
#69. 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.
Niall Ferguson
#70. A chaos so great and so obscure that nothing about it can be known'.
Niall Ferguson
#71. The reality, then, was that Indian nationalism was fuelled not by the impoverishment of the many but by the rejection of the privileged few.
Niall Ferguson
#72. Under the Convention of Chuenpi, signed in January 1841 (but then repudiated by the Emperor), Hong Kong became a British possession.
Niall Ferguson
#73. 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.
Niall Ferguson
#74. How can you make a revolution without firing squads?' Lenin asked. 'If we can't shoot a White Guard saboteur, what sort of great revolution is it? Nothing but talk and a bowl of mush.
Niall Ferguson
#75. 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.
Niall Ferguson
#76. a South American mercenary who served as Inspector General of the Turkish forces in Armenia, reported that the Governor-General of the province had ordered the local authorities in Adil Javus 'to exterminate all Armenian males of twelve years of age and over'.
Niall Ferguson
#77. Conceptio culpa Nasci pena Labor vita Necesse mori 'Conception is sin, birth is pain, life is toil, death is inevitable.
Niall Ferguson
#78. The dead outnumber the living fourteen to one, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril
Niall Ferguson
#79. Only after Eden agreed to leave Egypt unconditionally did Eisenhower arrange a billion-dollar rescue package from the IMF and the Export-Import Bank.
Niall Ferguson
#80. Why did the Germans and Japanese keep fighting after 1943 when every rational hope of victory had disappeared?
Niall Ferguson
#81. All empires have depended on local legitimacy and local collaboration; they are not based primarily on coercion. An imperial rule that relies wholly on coercion can't endure. It's too expensive.
Niall Ferguson
#82. 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.
Niall Ferguson
#84. 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
Niall Ferguson
#85. To make a living space, there first had to be a killing space.
Niall Ferguson
#86. Their mission achieved, Princip and Cabrinovic both tried to commit suicide, but the cyanide in the capsules they carried had oxidized and failed to kill them.
Niall Ferguson
#87. British Empire acted as an agency for imposing free markets, the rule of law, investor protection and relatively incorrupt government on roughly a quarter of the world.
Niall Ferguson
#88. From the point of view of most African-Americans, American independence postponed emancipation by at least a generation.
Niall Ferguson
#89. Institutions or products of culture. But they formalize a set of norms.
Niall Ferguson
#90. 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.
Niall Ferguson
#91. I would say I'm a 19th-century liberal, possibly even an 18th-century one.
Niall Ferguson
#92. 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.
Niall Ferguson
#93. Remember that the interest is paid on the face value of the bond, so if you can buy a 5 per cent bond at just 10 per cent of its face value you can earn a handsome yield of 50 per cent. In essence, you expect a return proportional to the risk you are prepared to take.
Niall Ferguson
#94. I was never a very convincing social conservative, and always avoided associating myself with that part of the broader conservative movement.
Niall Ferguson
#95. The subprime butterfly had flapped its wings and triggered a global hurricane.
Niall Ferguson
#96. The way the money was spent ensured that Spain's newfound wealth provided the entire continent with a monetary stimulus.
Niall Ferguson
#97. 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.
Niall Ferguson
#98. If being rightwing is thinking that Karl Marx's doctrine was a catastrophe for humanity, then I'm rightwing.
Niall Ferguson
#99. After the creation of credit by banks, the birth of the bond was the second great revolution in the ascent of money.
Niall Ferguson
#100. 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.
Niall Ferguson
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