Quotes from Niall Ferguson

I used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or a .400 baseball hitter,' he told the Wall Street Journal. 'But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.

the secret of our success as a species 'resides . . . in the collective brains of our communities

There is in fact no such thing as the future, singular; only futures, plural. There are multiple interpretations of history, to be sure, none definitive – but there is only one past. And although the past is over, for two reasons it is indispensable to our understanding of what we experience today and what lies ahead of us tomorrow and thereafter.

Large numbers of under-capitalized banks were a recipe for financial instability, and panics were a regular feature of American economic life - most spectacularly in the Great Depression, when a major banking crisis was exacerbated rather than mitigated by a monetary authority that had been operational for little more than fifteen years.

I, the British Empire began as a primarily economic phenomenon, its growth powered by commerce and consumerism. The demand for sugar drew merchants tot he carribean. British were not the first Empire builders. They were IMERIAL IMMITATORS!

From Boston to Bordeaux, revolution was in large measure the achievement of networks of wordsmiths, the best of whom were also orators whose shouted words could rally the crowd in the square and incite them to storm the towers of the old regime.

The German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, was one of the few authentic geniuses among nineteenth-century statesmen.

Unlike in the past, there are now two kinds of people in the world: those who own and run the networks, and those who merely use them.

Outlandish ideas stand a better chance of success if they come with royal approval.

When half the nodes of a random graph the size of most real-world networks are removed, the network is destroyed. But when the same procedure is carried out against a scale-free model of a similar size, 'the giant connected component resists even after removing more than 80 per cent of the nodes, and the average distance within it [between nodes] is practically the same as at the beginning

The spirit of policy and that of bureaucracy are diametrically opposed

No serious writer would claim that the reign of Western civilization was unblemished. Yet there are those who would insist that there was nothing whatever good about it. This position is absurd.

All rapidly accumulated wealth is either the result of luck or discovery, or the result of a legalised theft.

The torrent of verbiage comes about because professional politicians are more concerned with spin than substance, the media never cease to howl for 'something' to be done after every mishap, the lobbyists ensure that the small print protects the vested interests they serve, and the lawyers profit from the whole sorry mess.5

Facebook knows almost everything about their lives, their families and their friends . . . It is also a platform built on exhibitionism and voyeurism, where users edit themselves to exhibit a more flattering side and they quietly spy on their friends.

bear in mind when trying to compare housing with other forms of capital asset. The first is depreciation. Stocks do not wear out and require new roofs; houses do. The second is liquidity. As assets, houses are a great deal more expensive to convert into cash than stocks. The third is volatility.

Although the court recognizes his right to insist on his bond - to claim his pound of flesh - the law also prohibits him from shedding Antonio's blood.

We should not delude ourselves into thinking that our historical narratives, as commonly constructed, are anything more than retrofits.

There may be a lesson here for our time, too. The first era of financial globalization took at least a generation to achieve. But it was blown apart in a matter of days. And it would take more than two generations to repair the damage done by the guns of August 1914.

What the complacent Russians forgot was that their strengths – above all, their technological superiority – were not a permanent monopoly conferred by Providence on people with white skin. There was in fact nothing biological to prevent Asians from adopting Western forms of economic and political organization, nor from replicating Western inventions. The first Asian country to work out how to do so was Japan.

Jews were emphatically second-class subjects of the Tsar. A Pale of Settlement, outside which Jews were not supposed to reside, had been established by Catherine II in 1791, though it was not precisely delineated until 1835. It consisted of Russian-controlled Poland

Not the last time in Western history, the revolutionaries armed themselves with a new religion to steel themselves for greater outrageous.

You will look in vain for a European search engine, a European online retailer, a European social network. The biggest EU-based Internet company is Spotify, the Stockholm-based music and video streaming company founded in 2006.

Americans could once boast proudly that their system set the benchmark for the world; the United States was the rule of law. But now what we see is the rule of lawyers, which is something different.