British - Historian | April 18, 1964 -
As a teacher, my strategy is to encourage questioning. I'm the least authoritarian professor you'll ever meet.
Niall Ferguson
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I think that it is important to be gregarious, and that friendships are not just a leisure pursuit, that they are an integral part of what it is to be human, and one does better work if one has a circle of friends that is active.
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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.
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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 not really calculating machines or utility-maximisers.
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I can't imagine having a conversation about 'Celebrity Big Brother' in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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There aren't many people who really put their life on the line for human freedom.
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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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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.
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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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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 interaction.
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A historian is battling all the time to remember as much as possible.
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Through pure accident of birth, I've managed to stay relatively youthful.
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