Niall Ferguson quotes - page 2

In leaving Britain, the early emigrants risked not merely their life savings but their very lives. Their voyages were never without hazard; their destinations were often unhealthy and inhospitable. To us, their decision to gamble everything on a one-way ticket seems baffling. Yet without millions of such tickets - some purchased voluntarily, some not - there could have been no British Empire. For the indispensible foundation of the Empire was mass migration: the biggest in human history. This Britannic exodus changed the world. It turned whole continents white. (Niall Ferguson)
Oral history is a recipe for complete misrepresentation because almost no one tells the truth, even when they intend to. View quote
Niall Ferguson
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. View quote
Niall Ferguson
The British press has an insatiable appetite for making public things that should be private. It's a prurience that I've never understood. View quote
Niall Ferguson
I would say I'm a 19th-century liberal, possibly even an 18th-century one. View quote
Niall Ferguson
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. View quote
Niall Ferguson
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. View quote
Niall Ferguson
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. View quote
Niall Ferguson
There aren't many people who really put their life on the line for human freedom. View quote
Niall Ferguson
The rise of the West is, quite simply, the pre-eminent historical phenomenon of the second half of the second millennium after Christ. View quote
Niall Ferguson
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)
As a teacher, my strategy is to encourage questioning. I'm the least authoritarian professor you'll ever meet. View quote
Niall Ferguson
I can't think of anything I would rather do with my money than buy my children the best possible education. View quote
Niall Ferguson
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. View quote
Niall Ferguson
When I first came to Oxford, I struggled to feel comfortable in an Anglican, public school-dominated institution. View quote
Niall Ferguson
The law of unintended consequences is the only real law of history. View quote
Niall Ferguson
It's all very well for us to sit here in the west with our high incomes and cushy lives, and say it's 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 don't rule it out. View quote
Niall Ferguson
The ascent of money has been essential to the ascent of man. View quote
Niall Ferguson
I can't imagine having a conversation about 'Celebrity Big Brother' in Cambridge, Massachusetts. View quote
Niall Ferguson
You really struggle to be a successful empire if you are also the world's biggest debtor. View quote
Niall Ferguson
Back when China and America were the best of friends - or at least when their economic relationship seemed almost symbiotic - Moritz Schularick and I came up with the idea of "Chimerica,” which unlike the rival "G2” had the advantage of being a pun on the word "chimera,” signalling that we didn't think it could last. Well, Chimerica now looks well and truly dead. But what is taking its place? Cold Wok? Sweet and Sour War? The hunt for a catch-phrase continues. Actually, I'm not sure why I bother. In the end, it too will probably be Made in China. (Niall Ferguson)
I remember 1989 vividly, having spent much of that summer in Berlin before the Wall fell. And while largely peaceful revolutions swept through Central and Eastern Europe that year (it was only three years later, in Yugoslavia, that the death of Communism sparked war), there was no such turning point in China, where 1989 also saw the Tiananmen Square massacre. With the benefit of hindsight, the survival of Communism in China was a more significant historical phenomenon than its collapse east of the River Elbe. View quote
Niall Ferguson
Because of the central importance in Luther's thought of individual reading of the Bible, Protestantism encouraged literacy, not to mention printing, and these two things unquestionably encouraged economic development (the accumulation of ‘human capital') as well as scientific study. This proposition holds good not only in Prussia but also all over the world. Wherever Protestant missionaries went, they promoted literacy, with measurable long-term benefits to the societies they sought to educate; the same cannot be said of Catholic missionaries prior to Vatican II. View quote
Niall Ferguson