Niall Ferguson Quotes

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Niall Ferguson

Profession : Historian

Birth : April 18, 1964

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

Niall Ferguson

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

Niall Ferguson

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

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

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

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

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

The debate that I'm interested in having is with seriously smart people about how we design institutions in the 21st century that will genuinely address problems of poverty and educational underachievement.

Niall Ferguson

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

Civilisation is partly about restraining the male of the species from engaging in the violence of the hunter-gatherer period. But it doesn't take an awful lot to unleash it.

Niall Ferguson

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

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

Niall Ferguson

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

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

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

Niall Ferguson

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

Niall Ferguson

Through pure accident of birth, I've managed to stay relatively youthful.

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

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

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