Niall Ferguson

“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 financially unsustainable, unless you make major changes to things like retirement ages.”

“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.”

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

“Oral history is a recipe for complete misrepresentation because almost no one tells the truth, even when they intend to.”

“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 not really calculating machines or utility-maximisers.”

“When I first came to Oxford, I struggled to feel comfortable in an Anglican, public school-dominated institution.”

“President Obama's biggest weakness is weakness.”

“What's so seductive about the efficient markets hypothesis is that it applies nine years out of ten. A lot of the time it works. But when it stops working, you blow up.”

“It's not surprising so many people end up with credit-card debts. Saving for your retirement and buying a house are difficult things, and we don't educate people about them at all.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“What makes a civilization real to its inhabitants, in the end, is not just the splendid edifices at it centre, nor even the smooth functioning of the institutions they house. At its core, a civilization is the texts that are taught in its schools, learned by its students and recollected in times of tribulation.”

“I was never a very convincing social conservative, and always avoided associating myself with that part of the broader conservative movement.”

“Through pure accident of birth, I've managed to stay relatively youthful.”

“I'm over-industrious, so I don't feel quite such a deviant in America as I did in England.”

“I can't think of anything I would rather do with my money than buy my children the best possible education.”

“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.”

“So much of liberalism in its classical sense is taken for granted in the west today and even disrespected. We take freedom for granted, and because of this we don't understand how incredibly vulnerable it is.”

“There can be no understanding without that sympathy which puts us, through the imagination, and (another's) situation.”