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The law of unintended consequences is the only real law of history.

Niall Ferguson

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Niall Ferguson
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: April 18
Economic Historian
Historian
University Teacher
Glasgow
Scotland
Niall Campbell Ferguson
Consequence
Law
History
Real
Unintended
Consequences

More quotes by 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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In Stalin's Russia racial persecution was often disguised as class warfare. More than 1.5 million members of ethnic minorities died as a result of forced resettlement.
Niall Ferguson
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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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The Japanese Co-Prosperity Zone began as a racist utopia and ended as a cross between an abbatoir, a plantation and a brothel.
Niall Ferguson
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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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My arguments for liberal empire or whatever you want to call it - hegemony, primacy, you name it - are really activated by a sense that the alternatives involve more violence, more repression, more hardship.
Niall Ferguson
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I would say I'm a 19th-century liberal, possibly even an 18th-century one.
Niall Ferguson
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If young men have jobs - or the prospects of jobs - they are less likely to take up arms, they are less likely to join the resistance.
Niall Ferguson
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From the earliest days, the Rothschilds appreciated the importance of proximity to politicians, the men who determined not only the extent of budget deficits but also the domestic and foreign policies.
Niall Ferguson
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Oral history is a recipe for complete misrepresentation because almost no one tells the truth, even when they intend to.
Niall Ferguson
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When bond prices fall, interest rates soar, with painful consequences for all borrowers.
Niall Ferguson
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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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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 Armenian genocide showed what could happen when empires were beaten into nations.
Niall Ferguson
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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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Why did the Germans and Japanese keep fighting after 1943 when every rational hope of victory had disappeared?
Niall Ferguson