After 1968 the restored communist regime required all Czech rock musicians to sit a written exam in Marxism-Leninism

— Niall Ferguson

As a teacher, my strategy is to encourage questioning. I'm the least authoritarian professor you'll ever meet.

— Niall Ferguson

Historians are not scientists. They cannot (and should not even try to) establish universal laws of social or political "physics" with reliable predictive powers. Why? Because there is no possibility of repeating the single, multi-millennium experiment that constant to the past. The sample size of human history is one.

— Niall Ferguson

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.

— Niall Ferguson

Institutions or products of culture. But they formalize a set of norms.

— Niall Ferguson

It's all very well for us to sit here in the west with our high incomes and cushy lives, and say it's immoral to violate the sovereignty of another state. But if the effect of that is to bring people in that country economic and political freedom, to raise their standard of living, to increase their life expectancy, then don't rule it out.

— Niall Ferguson

It's all very well for us to sit here in the West with our high incomes and cushy lives, and say it's immoral to violate the sovereignty of another state. But if the effect of that is to bring people in that country economic and political freedom, to raise their standard of living, to increase their life expectancy, then don't rule it out.

— Niall Ferguson

It was an idea that made the crucial difference between British and Iberian America – an idea about the way people should govern themselves. Some people make the mistake of calling that idea ‘democracy’ and imagining that any country can adopt it merely by holding elections. In reality, democracy was the capstone of an edifice that had as its foundation the rule of law – to be precise, the sanctity of individual freedom and the security of private property rights, ensured by representative, constitutional government.

— Niall Ferguson

I wrote this book because I had formed a strong impression that the people currently living were paying insufficient attention to the dead.

— Niall Ferguson

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

— Niall Ferguson