Quotes from Niall Ferguson

Pero los intereses estadounidenses podían también verse satisfechos porque la ocupación de países extranjeros reportaba beneficios (al cabo de un tiempo extraordinariamente breve). Sobre esta base, era posible transformar con éxito Alemania Occidental y Japón y convertir sus regímenes delincuentes de la peor especie en modelos de economía capitalista y política democrática.

unintelligible because the print was so small.

Actions that help build trusted networks serve your cause

complaints from France that Washington was exploiting its reserve currency status in order to collect seigniorage from America's foreign creditors by printing dollars, much as medieval monarchs had exploited their monopoly on minting to debase the currency.

more likely to have creative ideas (or less likely to suffer from group-think).

To an extent that most accounts still underrate, the Bolshevik Revolution was a German-financed operation, though it was greatly facilitated by the incompetence of the Russian liberals.1 Lenin's goose should have been cooked after the failure of the first Bolshevik coup attempt in early July and his exposure as a German agent in the newspaper Zhivoe Slovo, which led to formal charges of treason against him and ten other Bolshevik leaders.

President Franklin Roosevelt argued that all that Americans had to fear was 'fear itself'.

we cannot transmit ideas and behaviours much beyond our friends' friends' friends

Another Russian unit ordered the Jews of a shtetl near Wolkowisk to strip naked, dance with one another, and then ride on pigs; they then proceeded to shoot every tenth person.

Giving the world's poor mobile telephony is proving easier than providing them with clean water – an argument, perhaps, for leaving the provision of clean water to the private sector rather than weak, corrupt governments.

they were a sort of vermin like plague-rats that had to be exterminated.

Rather than being a cause of the late twentieth-century crisis, the Internet appears to have been a consequence of the breakdown of hierarchical power.

money was commoditized labour

parece seguro que esta decadencia relativa continuará en un futuro inmediato. Para muchos estadounidenses, la principal importancia de Europa no es la de ser un rival estratégico sino un destino turístico.

Giving the world's poor mobile telephony is proving easier than providing them with clean water

The majority of books about World War I represent its causes as diplomatic, its course as military and its consequences as economic.

Power, let us not forget, is not just about being able to buy whatever you want; that is mere wealth. Power is about being able to get whatever you want at below the market price.

globalization. Only one era in history remotely resembles our own in terms of the degree of international economic and social integration, and that is the period from around 1875 to 1914. World trade grew to an unprecedented volume. Capital flowed across borders as never before.

the introduction of universal male suffrage in 1907.

Suddenly the people running Savings and Loans had nothing to lose - a clear case of what economists call moral hazard.

En resumen, Europa es una clase curiosa de unión, una confederación que, sin siquiera haber llegado a serlo, fantasea con convertirse en una federación. Tiene un ejecutivo, un parlamento, una cámara alta, un tribunal de justicia, un banco central, una moneda común, una bandera y un himno. Pero solo tiene un presupuesto común diminuto y lo justo para un ejército común. Muchas

This book is about the causes of our stationary state. It is inspired by Smith's insight that both stagnation and growth are in large measure the results of 'laws and institutions'. Its central thesis is that what was true of China in Smith's day is true of large parts of the Western world in our time. It is our laws and institutions that are the problem. The Great Recession is merely a symptom of a more profound Great Degeneration.

The people were divided into the persecuted and those who persecuted them. That wild beast, which lives in man and does not dare to show itself until the barriers of law and custom have been removed, was now set free. The signal was given, the barriers were down.

Por la lengua, la religión, la tenencia de la tierra y la estructura social, Irlanda era otro mundo.