Niall Ferguson Quotes - Page 2

You really struggle to be a successful empire if you are also the world's biggest debtor.

In the old days it would have been a relatively simple matter to have checked Hitler's territorial ambitions. All you'd have needed would have been the 1914 combination of Britain, France and Russia. Indeed, if such an alliance had acted decisively to defend Czechoslovakia in 1938, Hitler might even have been overthrown by his own military. But it was not to be.

I can't imagine having a conversation about 'Celebrity Big Brother' in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Armenian genocide showed what could happen when empires were beaten into nations.

I refuse to accept that Western civilization is like some hopeless old version of Microsoft DOS, doomed to freeze, then crash. I still cling to the hope that the United States is the Mac to Europe's PC, and that if one part of the West can successfully update and reboot itself, it's America.

The Japanese Co-Prosperity Zone began as a racist utopia and ended as a cross between an abbatoir, a plantation and a brothel.

Why did the Germans and Japanese keep fighting after 1943 when every rational hope of victory had disappeared?

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

When bond prices fall, interest rates soar, with painful consequences for all borrowers.

Collaboration is risky. If it fails, if the occupation is wound up prematurely and the bad guys come back to power, you might find yourself in some serious trouble.

The rise of the West is, quite simply, the pre-eminent historical phenomenon of the second half of the second millennium after Christ.

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.

I would say I'm a 19th-century liberal, possibly even an 18th-century one.