Niall Ferguson Quotes
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Between 1980 and 2000 the number of patents registered in Israel was 7652 compared with 367 for all the Arab countries combined.
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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.
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Oral history is a recipe for complete misrepresentation because almost no one tells the truth, even when they intend to.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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As a teacher, my strategy is to encourage questioning. I'm the least authoritarian professor you'll ever meet.
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From the earliest days, the Rothschilds appreciated the importance of proximity to politicians, the men who determined not only the extent of budget deficits but also the domestic and foreign policies.
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I would say I'm a 19th-century liberal, possibly even an 18th-century one.
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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.
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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.
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The law of unintended consequences is the only real law of history.
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The ascent of money has been essential to the ascent of man.
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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.
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My arguments for liberal empire or whatever you want to call it - hegemony, primacy, you name it - are really activated by a sense that the alternatives involve more violence, more repression, more hardship.
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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.
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The Armenian genocide showed what could happen when empires were beaten into nations.
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You really struggle to be a successful empire if you are also the world's biggest debtor.
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The rise of the West is, quite simply, the pre-eminent historical phenomenon of the second half of the second millennium after Christ.
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The British press has an insatiable appetite for making public things that should be private. It's a prurience that I've never understood.
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To make a living space, there first had to be a killing space.
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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.
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The Japanese Co-Prosperity Zone began as a racist utopia and ended as a cross between an abbatoir, a plantation and a brothel.
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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.
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The West may collapse very suddenly. Complex civilizations do that, because they operate, most of the time, on the edge of chaos.
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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.
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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.
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When I first came to Oxford, I struggled to feel comfortable in an Anglican, public school-dominated institution.
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In the financial sector, those whom the gods want to destroy they first teach math.
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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.
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