The Japanese Co-Prosperity Zone began as a racist utopia and ended as a cross between an abbatoir, a plantation and a brothel. — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
Why did the Germans and Japanese keep fighting after 1943 when every rational hope of victory had disappeared? — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
The law of unintended consequences is the only real law of history. — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
A historian is battling all the time to remember as much as possible. — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
I think the rise of quantitative econometrics and a highly mathematical approach to risk management was the obverse of a decline in… — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
Risk models are a substitute for historical knowledge, because they tend to work with just three years' worth of data. But three… — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
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… — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
“I wrote this book because I had formed a strong impression that the people currently living were paying insufficient attention to the… — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
The whole point about historians is that we are really communing with the dead. It's very restful - because you read. There's… — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
“Not the last time in Western history, the revolutionaries armed themselves with a new religion to steel themselves for greater outrageous.” — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
“We should not delude ourselves into thinking that our historical narratives, as commonly constructed, are anything more than retrofits.” — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
In Stalin's Russia racial persecution was often disguised as class warfare. More than 1.5 million members of ethnic minorities died as a… — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
“Drawing on the best modern scholarship, this book seeks to rescue the history of networks from the clutches of the conspiracy theorists,… — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
“Many historians still tend to assume that the spread of an idea or an ideology is a function of its inherent content… — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
“One difficulty is that we cannot always reconstruct the past thoughts of these non-Western peoples, for not all of them existed in… — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
“Historians are not scientists. They cannot (and should not even trying to) establish universal laws of social or political "physics" with reliable… — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
“And, as inflation has fallen, so bonds have rallied in what has been one of the great bond bull markets of modern… — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
We historians are increasingly using experimental psychology to understand the way we act. It is becoming very clear that our ability to… — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
The Armenian genocide showed what could happen when empires were beaten into nations. — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
Oral history is a recipe for complete misrepresentation because almost no one tells the truth, even when they intend to. — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
“For most of history, life has been hierarchical. A few have enjoyed the privileges that come from monopolizing violence. Everyone else has… — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
As a financial historian, I was quite isolated in Oxford - British historians are supposed to write about kings - so the… — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
“The dead outnumber the living fourteen to one, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at… — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
“The result is one of the greatest paradoxes of modern history: that an economic system designed to offer infinite choice to the… — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
In the old days it would have been a relatively simple matter to have checked Hitler's territorial ambitions. All you'd have needed… — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“I wrote this book because I had formed a strong impression that the people currently living were paying insufficient attention to the dead.” — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
“Consider this: the US economy created 2.4 million jobs in the three years beginning in June 2009. In the same period, 3.3 million Americans… — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
I think the rise of quantitative econometrics and a highly mathematical approach to risk management was the obverse of a decline in interest in… — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
“Is it better today to be in a network, which gives you influence, than in a hierarchy, which gives you power?” — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
As a teacher, my strategy is to encourage questioning. I'm the least authoritarian professor you'll ever meet. — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
Ask me not, 'Are you rightwing,' but ask me 'Are you a committed believer in individual freedom, the values of the enlightenment?' Then, yeah,… — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
“Many historians still tend to assume that the spread of an idea or an ideology is a function of its inherent content in relation… — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
“the twentieth century ran a series of experiments, imposing quite different institutions on two sets of Germans (in West and East), two sets of… — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
“Historians are not scientists. They cannot (and should not even trying to) establish universal laws of social or political "physics" with reliable predictive powers.… — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
You really struggle to be a successful empire if you are also the world's biggest debtor. — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
“One difficulty is that we cannot always reconstruct the past thoughts of these non-Western peoples, for not all of them existed in civilizations with… — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
If young men have jobs - or the prospects of jobs - they are less likely to take up arms, they are less likely… — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
