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" I think the rise of quantitative econometrics and a highly mathematical approach to risk management was the obverse of a decline in interest in financial history. "
Niall Ferguson
Think
History
Management
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" 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. "
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" I would say I'm a 19th-century liberal, possibly even an 18th-century one. "
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" There aren't many people who really put their life on the line for human freedom. "
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" Oral history is a recipe for complete misrepresentation because almost no one tells the truth, even when they intend to. "
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" As a teacher, my strategy is to encourage questioning. I'm the least authoritarian professor you'll ever meet. "
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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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" 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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" 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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Things
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" In general, I have felt more at home in the U.S. than I ever felt in England. "
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General
Felt
England
" If being rightwing is thinking that Karl Marx's doctrine was a catastrophe for humanity, then I'm rightwing. "
Niall Ferguson
Humanity
Being
Thinking
" 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. "
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Resources
Best
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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
Half
Rise
West
" Risk models are a substitute for historical knowledge, because they tend to work with just three years' worth of data. But three years is not a long time in financial history. "
Niall Ferguson
Knowledge
Long
Time
" Only in England would 'professor gets divorced and remarried' be a story. "
Niall Ferguson
England
Professor
Story
" We historians are increasingly using experimental psychology to understand the way we act. It is becoming very clear that our ability to evaluate risk is hedged by all sorts of cognitive biases. It's a miracle that we get anything right. "
Niall Ferguson
Psychology
Right
Risk
" The debate that I'm interested in having is with seriously smart people about how we design institutions in the 21st century that will genuinely address problems of poverty and educational underachievement. "
Niall Ferguson
Problems
Poverty
People
" Through pure accident of birth, I've managed to stay relatively youthful. "
Niall Ferguson
Stay
Through
Accident
" As a financial historian, I was quite isolated in Oxford - British historians are supposed to write about kings - so the quality of intellectual life in my field is much higher at Harvard. The students work harder there. "
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Quality
Life
Kings
" Civilisation is partly about restraining the male of the species from engaging in the violence of the hunter-gatherer period. But it doesn't take an awful lot to unleash it. "
Niall Ferguson
Engaging
Violence
Species
" I have three kids in Britain, and I am there at least once a month. "
Niall Ferguson
Month
Kids
Three
" Ask me not, 'Are you rightwing,' but ask me 'Are you a committed believer in individual freedom, the values of the enlightenment?' Then, yeah, if being rightwing means believing Adam Smith was right, both in the 'Wealth of Nations' and the 'Theory of Moral Sentiments,' then I'm rightwing. "
Niall Ferguson
Freedom
Moral
Values
" 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. "
Niall Ferguson
Life
Freedom
People
" When I first came to Oxford, I struggled to feel comfortable in an Anglican, public school-dominated institution. "
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First
Public
Oxford
" 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. "
Niall Ferguson
Great
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Sympathy
" President Obama's biggest weakness is weakness. "
Niall Ferguson
President
Biggest
Weakness
" I can't think of anything I would rather do with my money than buy my children the best possible education. "
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Money
Children
Best
" I was never a very convincing social conservative, and always avoided associating myself with that part of the broader conservative movement. "
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Conservative
Never
" I'm over-industrious, so I don't feel quite such a deviant in America as I did in England. "
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America
Did
England
" 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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Human
You
Dead
" The real point of me isn't that I'm good looking. It's that I'm clever. I've got a brain! I would rather be called a highly intelligent historian than a gorgeous pouting one. "
Niall Ferguson
Me
Looking
Intelligent