Niall Ferguson Quotes

“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

Perennial truths of financial history. Sooner or later every bubble bursts. Sooner or later the bearish sellers outnumber the bullish buyers. Sooner or later greed turns to fear.

— Niall Ferguson

“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

“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

“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

“In response to discrimination and persecution in the Holy Roman Empire. They had moved further east into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and, despite the violence directed against them during the 1648 Ukrainian revolt, had continued this eastward pattern of migration and settlement into the eighteenth century. With the partitions of Poland, the areas of densest Jewish settlement came under Russian rule,”

— Niall Ferguson

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

— Niall Ferguson

“We must pose the familiar question about how far our civil liberties have been eroded by the national security state ... Somehow it is always a choice between habeas corpus and hundreds of corpses.”

— Niall Ferguson

“The Armenian genocide was a horrific illustration of the convulsions that could seize a multi-ethnic polity trying to mutate from empire into nation state.”

— Niall Ferguson

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

— Niall Ferguson

“Ask me not, 'Are you rightwing,' but ask me 'Are you a committed believer in individual freedom, the values of the enlightenment?' Then, yeah, if being rightwing means believing Adam Smith was right, both in the 'Wealth of Nations' and the 'Theory of Moral Sentiments,' then I'm rightwing.”

— 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.”

— Niall Ferguson

“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.”

— Niall Ferguson

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

— Niall Ferguson

“Only in England would 'professor gets divorced and remarried' be a story.”

— Niall Ferguson

“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.”

— Niall Ferguson

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

— Niall Ferguson

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

— Niall Ferguson

“I would say I'm a 19th-century liberal, possibly even an 18th-century one.”

— Niall Ferguson

“I'm over-industrious, so I don't feel quite such a deviant in America as I did in England.”

— Niall Ferguson

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

— Niall Ferguson

“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

“When I first came to Oxford, I struggled to feel comfortable in an Anglican, public school-dominated institution.”

— Niall Ferguson

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

“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.”

— Niall Ferguson

“That investors should be able to take physical possession of the cotton which underpinned the bonds if the South failed to make its interest payments. Collateral is, after all, only good if a creditor can get his hands on it. And that is why the fall of New Orleans in April 1862 was the real turning point in the American Civil War. With the South's main port in Union hands, any investor who wanted to get hold of Southern cotton had to run the Union's naval blockade not once but twice, in and out.”

— Niall Ferguson

“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

“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

“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.”

— Niall Ferguson

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

“Investors tended to infer future changes in fiscal and monetary policy from political events, which were regularly reported in private correspondence, in newspapers and by telegraph agencies. Among the most influential bases for their inferences were three assumptions: that any war would disrupt trade and hence lower tax revenues for all governments; that direct involvement in war would increase a state's expenditure as well as reducing its tax revenues, leading to substantial new borrowings; and that the impact of war on the private sector would make it hard for monetary authorities in combatant countries to maintain the convertibility of paper banknotes into gold, thereby increasing the risk of inflation.”

— Niall Ferguson

“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

“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.”

— Niall Ferguson

“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

“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.”

— Niall Ferguson

“They dug up so much silver to pay for their wars of conquest that the metal itself dramatically declined in value - that is to say, in its purchasing power with respect to other goods.”

— Niall Ferguson

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

“Somehow no really terrible Western ideas like, say, witch-burning or communism ever get mentioned, though they seem just as plausibly the products of Judaeo-Christian culture as the spirit of capitalism. In any case, while culture may instil norms, institutions create incentives. Britons versed in much the same culture behaved very differently depending on whether they emigrated to New England or worked for the East India Company in Bengal. In the former case we find inclusive institutions, in the latter extractive ones.”

— Niall Ferguson

“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

“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

“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.”

— Niall Ferguson

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

— Niall Ferguson

“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.”

— Niall Ferguson

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

“Increasingly, its discount rate was seen as the minimum short-term interest rate in the so-called money market (for short-term credit, mostly through the discounting of commercial bills).”

— Niall Ferguson

“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

“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

“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.”

— Niall Ferguson

“You really struggle to be a successful empire if you are also the world's biggest debtor.”

— Niall Ferguson

“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