Quotes by Niall Ferguson - Page 2

Empires, essentially, create order. In their absence, you don't end up with lots of happy, little nation-states full of people sitting around campfires singing John Lennon's "Imagine." What you end up with is civil war, anarchy.
Niall Ferguson / Historian
War
Order
People
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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 / Historian
Active
Circles
Gregarious
Important
Leisure
Pursuit
Thinking
Circle
Friendships
Integral
Integral Part
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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 / Historian
Cognitive
Evaluate
Miracle
Psychology
Biases
Experimental
Historians
Increasingly
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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 / Historian
Calculating
Human Beings
Machines
Psychology
Good Great Fear
Behavioural
Good Fear Great
Great Thing
Pretty Good
Swing
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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 / Historian
Retirement
Surprising
Victim
Welfare
Welfare State
Life Success Time
Ages
Dysfunctional
Financially
Unsustainable
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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 / Historian
Adam
Believer
Committed
Enlightenment
Individual Freedom
Nations
Sentiments
Theory
Wealth
Yeah
Smith
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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 / Historian
America
Civilization
Europe
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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.
Niall Ferguson / Historian
Emotional
Roots
Swings
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American Empire- it is an empire that lacks the drive to export its capital, its people and its culture to those backward regions which need them most urgently and which, if they are neglected, will breed the greatest threats to its security. It is an empire, in short, that dare not speak its name. It is an empire in denial.
Niall Ferguson / Historian
Names
Needs
People
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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.
Niall Ferguson / Historian
Country
Economic
Expectancy
Immoral
Life Expectancy
People
Political
Political Freedom
Sovereignty
Living
Bring
High
Say
Incomes
Standard
Well
Raise
Rule
Sit
Violate
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In the old days it would have been a relatively simple matter to have checked Hitler's territorial ambitions. All you'd have needed would have been the 1914 combination of Britain, France and Russia. Indeed, if such an alliance had acted decisively to defend Czechoslovakia in 1938, Hitler might even have been overthrown by his own military. But it was not to be.
Niall Ferguson / Historian
Ambition
Military
Simple
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For 500 years the West patented six killer applications that set it apart. The first to download them was Japan. Over the last century, one Asian country after another has downloaded these killer apps- competition, modern science, the rule of law and private property rights, modern medicine, the consumer society and the work ethic. Those six things are the secret sauce of Western civilization.
Niall Ferguson / Historian
Country
Law
Years
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Niall Ferguson Quotes - Page 2

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