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Economic Historian Inspirational Quotes (81)

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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.
Niall Ferguson
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The Quest for Prosperity is an important book. Written with verve and clarity, it reflects a deep understanding of global economic issues, and proposes practical solutions that anyone concerned with the plight of the world's poor would be wise to read.
Robert Fogel
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Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness.
Karl Polanyi
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Nobody knows, understands or can possibly explain why that preposterous creature does what he does. In fact there is no explanation - or better there is only one explanation: the person in question is stupid.
Carlo M. Cipolla
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Finally, states have monopolized, or sought to monopolize, armed force.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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The “Vasco da Gama's era” ends in a nightmare in which men-Westerners and non-Westerners alike-are bewildered by this confusion and the old fancy of the apprenti sorcier becomes tragically actual.
Carlo M. Cipolla
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I rather wish to rest my case on material considerations, not those of the social future but those of the actual historical period of the capitalist world-economy.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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It seems to me the only pertinent question is: cui bono? It is clear that the size of the privileged strata as a percentage of the whole has grown significantly under historical capitalism. And for these people, the world they know is better on the whole than any their earlier counterparts knew.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports.
Eric Hobsbawm
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Empires, essentially, create order. In their absence, you don't end up with lots of happy, little nation-states full of people sitting around campfires singing John Lennon's Imagine. What you end up with is civil war, anarchy.
Niall Ferguson
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To predict the future we would have to know today what we will learn tomorrow which will shape our future actions
Douglass North
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The concept that one ought to restrict one's political involvement to one's own state was deeply antithetical to those who were pursuing the accumulation of capital for its own sake.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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Most things get steadily worse.
Charles Issawi
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People resist exploitation. They resist as actively as they can, as passively as they must.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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The rise of the West is, quite simply, the pre-eminent historical phenomenon of the second half of the second millennium after Christ.
Niall Ferguson
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You really struggle to be a successful empire if you are also the world's biggest debtor.
Niall Ferguson
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The West may collapse very suddenly. Complex civilizations do that, because they operate, most of the time, on the edge of chaos.
Niall Ferguson
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To those critics who see capitalism as a system of inegalitarian, oppressive structures, its defenders have vaunted its ability to recognize and encourage what they call individual merit and asserted not only the desirability but also the inevitability of differential reward, of earned privilege, so to speak.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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I think the condition of imperial denial is a handicap because if you do not recognize that you are essentially performing the functions of an empire, you are incapable of learning from the mistakes of past empires.
Niall Ferguson
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A second variety concentrated on presumed major transformations of the capitalist system as of some recent point in time, in which the whole earlier point of time served as a mythologized foil against which to treat the empirical reality of the present.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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For long, history was mainly political history, and historical narrative was confined to an account of the most important crises in political life, or to an account of wars and great generals.
Michael Rostovtzeff
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Historical capitalism is a materialist civilization.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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Educated, eyes-open optimism pays pessimism can only offer the empty consolation of being right.
David Landes
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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.
Niall Ferguson
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