“My fundamental tenets are concerned with freedom of the individual; the market isn't perfect, but it's the best available way of allocating resources.”
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Author detail
Niall Campbell Ferguson is a British historian from Scotland. He is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University. He is also a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, University of Oxford, a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities. His specialties are international history, economic and financial history, and British and American imperialism. He is known for his provocative, contrarian views. - Wikipedia
Quotes
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“My fundamental tenets are concerned with freedom of the individual; the market isn't perfect, but it's the best available way of allocating resources.”
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“When I first came to Oxford, I struggled to feel comfortable in an Anglican, public school-dominated institution.”
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“The great thing about behavioural psychology and economics is that they help us to see that there are actually pretty good reasons why human beings swing from greed to fear, and why we're no...”
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“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.”
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“The British press has an insatiable appetite for making public things that should be private. It's a prurience that I've never understood.”
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“It's great to see countries like China and India lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty by essentially copying Western ways of doing things.”
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“One of the main arguments that I make in my new book, 'The Great Degeneration,' is that the rule of law in the U.S. is becoming the rule of lawyers.”
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“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 bri...”
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“There aren't many people who really put their life on the line for human freedom.”
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“Ask me not, 'Are you rightwing,' but ask me 'Are you a committed believer in individual freedom, the values of the enlightenment?' Then, yeah, if being rightwing means believing Adam Smith w...”
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“As a financial historian, I was quite isolated in Oxford - British historians are supposed to write about kings - so the quality of intellectual life in my field is much higher at Harvard. T...”
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“I think the rise of quantitative econometrics and a highly mathematical approach to risk management was the obverse of a decline in interest in financial history.”
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“The whole point about historians is that we are really communing with the dead. It's very restful - because you read. There's some sociopathic problem that makes me prefer it to human intera...”
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“Civilisation is partly about restraining the male of the species from engaging in the violence of the hunter-gatherer period. But it doesn't take an awful lot to unleash it.”
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“Over time, the welfare state has become dysfunctional in a surprising way. But in a way it became a victim of its own success: It became so successful at prolonging life, that it becomes fin...”
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