Niall Ferguson's Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

President Obama's biggest weakness is weakness.