Quotes About Niall Ferguson

Something that's seldom appreciated about me is that I am in sympathy with a great deal of what Marx wrote, except that I'm on the side of the bourgeoisie.

Niall Ferguson is an intellectual fraud whose job, for years, has been to impress dumb, rich Americans with his accent and flatter them with his writings.

It is curious that the two best-known British historians in the United States are Andrew Roberts and Niall Ferguson, each of whom represents, in fact, a different school of serious historical writing, and both of whom seem to have gained for themselves, perhaps without intending to, a special reputation on the American right.

The debate that I'm interested in having is with seriously smart people about how we design institutions in the 21st century that will genuinely address problems of poverty and educational underachievement.

In 1383, the authorities in Marseille extended the isolation period to forty days, giving the quarantine its name. (The duration was a biblical touch, inspired by the forty days and forty nights of the flood in Genesis, the forty years the Israelites spent wandering in the wilderness, and the forty days of Lent.)

The principle of limited liability was implied: shareholders stood to lose only their investment in the company and no other assets in the event that it failed.15

the sellers of these 'structured products' boasted that securitization was having the effect of allocating risk 'to those best able to bear it'. Only later did it turn out that risk was being allocated to those least able to understand it.

a better explanation may be the fundamental deterioration of standards in both legislation and governance that we see in nearly every democracy, regardless of their different twentieth-century histories

an Empire-less Britain would be just a 'cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herring and potatoes'.

The Four Black Boxes To demonstrate that Western institutions have indeed degenerated, I am going to have to open up some long-sealed black boxes. The first is the one labelled 'democracy'. The second is labelled 'capitalism'. The third is 'the rule of law'. And the fourth is 'civil society'. Together

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