Quotes by 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.

— Niall Ferguson

Wisdom

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

Wisdom

One of the main arguments that I make in my new book, 'The Great Degeneration,' is that the rule of law in the U.S. is becoming the rule of lawyers.

— Niall Ferguson

Wisdom

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

Wisdom

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

Success

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

Freedom

If being rightwing is thinking that Karl Marx's doctrine was a catastrophe for humanity, then I'm rightwing.

— Niall Ferguson

Life

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

— Niall Ferguson

Wisdom

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

— Niall Ferguson

Courage

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

— Niall Ferguson

Wisdom

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

— Niall Ferguson

Wisdom

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

— Niall Ferguson

Wisdom

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

— Niall Ferguson

Wisdom

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

— Niall Ferguson

Freedom

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

Freedom

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

Success

As a financial historian, I was quite isolated in Oxford - British historians are supposed to write about kings - so the quality of intellectual life in my field is much higher at Harvard. The students work harder there.

— Niall Ferguson

Success

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.

— Niall Ferguson

Wisdom

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

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.

— Niall Ferguson

Wisdom

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

Courage

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.

— Niall Ferguson

Life

President Obama's biggest weakness is weakness.

— Niall Ferguson

Wisdom

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

— Niall Ferguson

Wisdom