Quotes from Niall Ferguson

La presente Constitución, que nace de la voluntad de los pueblos y los estados de Europa de construir un futuro común, crea la Unión Europea, a la que los estados miembros confieren competencias para alcanzar sus objetivos comunes. La Unión coordinará las políticas de los estados miembros encaminadas a lograr dichos objetivos y ejercerá, de modo comunitario, las competencias que estos le transfieran.»

the Victorian revolution in global communications achieved 'the annihilation of distance'. But it also made possible long-distance annihilation. In time of war, distance simply had to be overcome – for the simple reason that Britain's principal source of military power now lay on the other side of the world.

The only way to ensure that Red Army recruits did not desert or run away, Trotsky had concluded, was to mount machine-guns in their rear and shoot any who failed to advance against the enemy. This was the choice he offered: possible death in the front or certain death in the rear. 'We must put an end once and for all', he sneered with a characteristically caustic turn of phrase, 'to the papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life.

Para entender el declive económico de Argentina hace falta, una vez más, ser conscientes de que la inflación es un fenómeno político tanto como monetario.

Essentially, we took two peoples Ã¢â'¬â€œ the Koreans and the Germans Ã¢â'¬â€œ and divided them in two. South Koreans and West Germans got capitalist institutions; North Koreans and East Germans got communist ones. The divergence that occurred in the space of just a few decades was enormous.

Governments (and large corporations) issue bonds as a way of borrowing money from a broader range of people and institutions than just banks.

The British press has an insatiable appetite for making public things that should be private. It's a prurience that I've never understood.

If young men have jobs - or the prospects of jobs - they are less likely to take up arms, they are less likely to join the resistance.

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.

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

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.

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.

For most of the nineteenth century, N M Rothschild was part of the biggest bank in the world which dominated the international bond market. For a contemporary equivalent, one has to imagine a merger between Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, J P Morgan and probably Goldman Sachs too – as well, perhaps, as the International Monetary Fund, given the nineteen-century Rothschild's role in stabilising the finances of numerous governments.

So much of liberalism in its classical sense is taken for granted in the west today and even disrespected. We take freedom for granted, and because of this we don't understand how incredibly vulnerable it is.

If the financial system has a defect, it is that it reflects and magnifies what we human beings are like. Money amplifies our tendency to overreact, to swing from exuberance when things are going well to deep depression when they go wrong. Booms and busts are products, at root, of our emotional volatility.

The ascent of money has been essential to the ascent of man.

there really is no such thing as 'the future', singular. There are only multiple, unforeseeable futures, which will never lose their capacity to take us by surprise.

perennial truths of financial history. Sooner or later every bubble bursts. Sooner or later the bearish sellers outnumber the bullish buyers. Sooner or later greed turns to fear.

No civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear to itself, is indestructible.

In a time of chaos, it is the micro-manager who ascends

we shall quickly find ourselves about as important to the algorithms as animals currently are to us.

The real social contract, (Edmund Burke) argued, was not Rousseau's social contract between the noble savage and the General Will, but a "partnership" between the present generation and future generations.

What makes a civilization real to its inhabitants, in the end, is not just the splendid edifices at it centre, nor even the smooth functioning of the institutions they house. At its core, a civilization is the texts that are taught in its schools, learned by its students and recollected in times of tribulation.