Niall Ferguson Quotes

The law of unintended consequences is the only real law of history.

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

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

The West may collapse very suddenly. Complex civilizations do that, because they operate, most of the time, on the edge of chaos.

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

The British press has an insatiable appetite for making public things that should be private. It's a prurience that I've never understood.

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.

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

I can't imagine having a conversation about 'Celebrity Big Brother' in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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.

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.

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

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

The Japanese Co-Prosperity Zone began as a racist utopia and ended as a cross between an abbatoir, a plantation and a brothel.

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

Between 1980 and 2000 the number of patents registered in Israel was 7652 compared with 367 for all the Arab countries combined.

A historian is battling all the time to remember as much as possible.

Collaboration is risky. If it fails, if the occupation is wound up prematurely and the bad guys come back to power, you might find yourself in some serious trouble.

The rise of the West is, quite simply, the pre-eminent historical phenomenon of the second half of the second millennium after Christ.

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

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

In the financial sector, those whom the gods want to destroy they first teach math.

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

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

Today, the average Korean works a thousand hours more a year than the average German. A thousand. ... That is the end of the Great Divergence.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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