Niall Ferguson Quotes

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.

The Japanese had no idea what elements of Western culture and institutions where the crucial ones, so they ended up copying everything, from western clothes and hair styles to the European practice of colonizing foreign people. Unfortunately, they took up empire-building at precisely the moment when the cost of imperialism began to exceed the benefits.

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

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

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