Quotes from Niall Ferguson

The English language is the one thing the Commonwealth still has in common.

Drawing on the best modern scholarship, this book seeks to rescue the history of networks from the clutches of the conspiracy theorists, and to show that historical change often can and should be understood in terms of precisely such network-based challenges to hierarchical orders

News of the Indian Mutiny had taken forty-six days to reach London in 1857, travelling at an effective speed of 3.8 miles an hour. News of the huge Nobi earthquake in Japan in 1891 took a single day, travelling at 246 miles an hour, sixty-five times faster.50

We must pose the familiar question about how far our civil liberties have been eroded by the national security state… Somehow it is always a choice between habeas corpus and hundreds of corpses.

There are two disadvantages to this political fragmentation. Small countries are often formed as a result of civil war within an earlier multi-ethnic polity – the most common form of conflict since 1945. That in itself is economically disruptive. In addition, they can be economically inefficient even in peacetime, too small to justify all the paraphernalia of statehood

Since de Soto published The Mystery of Capital, revolutions in countries like Tunisia and Egypt have provided compelling evidence in support of his approach. He sees the 'Arab Spring' primarily as a revolt by frustrated would-be entrepreneurs against corrupt, rent-seeking regimes that preyed on their efforts to accumulate capital. The prime example is the story of the twenty-six-year-old

Banknotes (which originated in seventh-century China) are pieces of paper which have next to no intrinsic worth. They are simply promises to pay (hence their original Western designation as 'promissory notes')

The Armenian genocide was a horrific illustration of the convulsions that could seize a multi-ethnic polity trying to mutate from empire into nation state.

kulttuurien kamppailu Huntingtonin merkityksessä tuntuu edelleen kaukaiselta mahdollisuudelta. Pikemminkin näemme samankaltaisen siirroksen, joka 500 viime vuoden mittaan päättyi miltei aina lännen eduksi. Yksi sivilisaatio heikkenee, toinen vahvistuu. Ratkaiseva kysymys ei ole, ryhtyvätkö ne taistelemaan, vaan heilahtaako heikompi heikkoudesta suoranaiseen kaaokseen.

The leaders of continental Europe would indeed plough relentlessly ahead with monetary union, so that by the beginning of 1999 the euro Ã¢â'¬â€œ a single European currency managed by an authentically federal European Central Bank Ã¢â'¬â€œ was a reality. In doing so, they revealed their indestructible faith in the power of hierarchical structures even in an age of exponential network growth.

A generation mostly removed from conflict Ã¢â'¬â€œ the baby-boomers Ã¢â'¬â€œ had failed to learn the lesson that it is not unregulated networks that reduce inequality but wars, revolutions, hyperinflations and other forms of expropriation.

Sivilisaation ydin ovat tekstit, jotka sen kouluissa opetetaan, jotka sen oppilaat oppivat ja jotka muistetaan koettelemusten aikana.

young people at Western schools and universities have been given the idea of a liberal education, without the substance of historical knowledge. They have been taught isolated 'modules', not narratives, much less chronologies. They have been trained in the formulaic analysis of document excerpts, not in the key skill of reading widely and fast.

It is not the fault of the mirror if it reflects our blemishes as clearly as our beauty.

The Kissingers descended from Meyer Löb (1767–1838), a Jewish teacher from Kleineibstadt who in 1817 took his surname from his adopted home of Bad Kissingen (complying with an 1813 Bavarian edict that required Jews to have surnames).47 By his first wife he had two children

Some [surrendering Germans] would crawl on their knees,' recalled one British soldier, 'holding a picture of a woman or a child in their hands above their heads but everyone was killed. The excitement was gone. We killed in cold blood because it was our duty to kill as much as we could.

According to S. A. Nilus, a secret Jewish council known as the Sanhedrin had hypnotized the Japanese into believing they were one of the tribes of Israel; it was the Jews' aim, Nilus insisted, 'to set a distraught Russia awash with blood and to inundate it, and then Europe, with the yellow hordes of a resurgent China guided by Japan'.

the dichotomy between network and hierarchy is an ancient idea.

least 40 million people died as a result of the epidemic, the majority of them suffocated by a lethal accumulation of blood and other fluid in the lungs. Ironically, unlike most flu epidemics, but like the war that preceded and spread it, the influenza of 1918 disproportionately killed young adults. One in every hundred American males between the ages of 25 and 34 fell victim to the 'Spanish Lady'. Strikingly, the global peak of mortality was in October and November 1918.

The difference between Victorian liberals and Soviet Communists should now be clear. Nature, in the form of a new pathogen, played a much larger role in the Irish Famine. The Ukrainian Holodomor, by contrast, was largely man-made and with malice aforethought.

Without the spread of British rule around the world, it is hard to believe that the structures of liberal capitalism would have been so successfully established in so many different economies around the world.

How can you make a revolution without firing squads?' Lenin asked. 'If we can't shoot a White Guard saboteur, what sort of great revolution is it? Nothing but talk and a bowl of mush.

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 the means of recording and preserving thought. In the end, history is primarily the study of civilizations, because without written records the historian is thrown back on spearheads and pot fragments, from which much less can be inferred. The

The biggest threat to Western civilization is posed not by other civilizations, but by our own pusillanimity — and by the historical ignorance that feeds it.