Quotes by Niall Ferguson

Its all very well for us to sit here in the west with our high incomes and cushy lives, and say its immoral to violate the sovereignty of another state. But if the effect of that is to bring people in that country economic and political freedom, to raise their standard of living, to increase their life expectancy, then dont rule it out.

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 dont understand how incredibly vulnerable it is.

There can be no understanding without that sympathy which puts us, through the imagination, and (anothers) situation.

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.

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

What makes a civilization real to its inhabitants, in the end, is not just the splendid edifices at it centre, nor even the smooth functioning of the institutions they house. At its core, a civilization is the texts that are taught in its schools, learned by its students and recollected in times of tribulation.

The Japanese had no idea what elements of Western culture and institutions where the crucial ones, so they ended up copying everything, from western clothes and hair styles to the European practice of colonizing foreign people. Unfortunately, they took up empire-building at precisely the moment when the cost of imperialism began to exceed the benefits.

If the financial system has a defect, it is that it reflects and magnifies what we human beings are like. Money amplifies our tendency to overreact, to swing from exuberance when things are going well to deep depression when they go wrong. Booms and busts are products, at root, of our emotional volatility.

It was an idea that made the crucial difference between British and Iberian America – an idea about the way people should govern themselves. Some people make the mistake of calling that idea ‘democracy’ and imagining that any country can adopt it merely by holding elections. In reality, democracy was the capstone of an edifice that had as its foundation the rule of law – to be precise, the sanctity of individual freedom and the security of private property rights, ensured by representative, constitutional government.

Historians are not scientists. They cannot (and should not even trying to) establish universal laws of social or political physics with reliable predictive powers. Why? Because there is no possibility of repeating the single, multi-millennium experiment that constant to the past. The sample size of human history is one.

The dead outnumber the living fourteen to one, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril

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

The real social contract, (Edmund Burke) argued, was not Rousseaus social contract between the noble savage and the General Will, but a partnership between the present generation and future generations.

Not the last time in Western history, the revolutionaries armed themselves with a new religion to steel themselves for greater outrageous.

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

No civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear to itself, is indestructible.

Who killed Christianity in Europe? Was it, as (Max) Weber himself predicted, that the spirit of capitalism was bound to destroy the Protestant ethic parents, as materialism corrupted the original aestheticism of the godly?

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

As a teacher, my strategy is to encourage questioning. Im the least authoritarian professor youll ever meet.

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 were not really calculating machines or utility-maximisers.