Niall Ferguson Quotes

Author Image

Niall Ferguson

Profession : Historian

Birth : April 18, 1964

I can't think of anything I would rather do with my money than buy my children the best possible education.

Niall Ferguson

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

Niall Ferguson

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

Niall Ferguson

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

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

Niall Ferguson

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

Risk models are a substitute for historical knowledge, because they tend to work with just three years' worth of data. But three years is not a long time in financial history.

Niall Ferguson

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

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

I have three kids in Britain, and I am there at least once a month.

Niall Ferguson

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

Niall Ferguson

In general, I have felt more at home in the U.S. than I ever felt in England.

Niall Ferguson

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

Niall Ferguson

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

Niall Ferguson

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

It's not surprising so many people end up with credit-card debts. Saving for your retirement and buying a house are difficult things, and we don't educate people about them at all.

Niall Ferguson