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" 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
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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. "
Niall Ferguson
Fear
Good
Great
" 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
Things
Understood
Never
" 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
" 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
" If being rightwing is thinking that Karl Marx's doctrine was a catastrophe for humanity, then I'm rightwing. "
Niall Ferguson
Humanity
Being
Thinking
" 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
" I can't imagine having a conversation about 'Celebrity Big Brother' in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "
Niall Ferguson
Brother
Big
Conversation
" 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. "
Niall Ferguson
India
Great
People
" There aren't many people who really put their life on the line for human freedom. "
Niall Ferguson
Who
Life
Human
" I can't think of anything I would rather do with my money than buy my children the best possible education. "
Niall Ferguson
Money
Children
Best
" President Obama's biggest weakness is weakness. "
Niall Ferguson
President
Biggest
Weakness
" 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. "
Niall Ferguson
Human
You
Dead
" A historian is battling all the time to remember as much as possible. "
Niall Ferguson
Time
Possible
Remember
" Only in England would 'professor gets divorced and remarried' be a story. "
Niall Ferguson
England
Professor
Story
" 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. "
Niall Ferguson
Years
Up
Time
" 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
" 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. "
Niall Ferguson
Things
End
House
" I have three kids in Britain, and I am there at least once a month. "
Niall Ferguson
Month
Kids
Three
" I was never a very convincing social conservative, and always avoided associating myself with that part of the broader conservative movement. "
Niall Ferguson
Myself
Conservative
Never
" 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. "
Niall Ferguson
Retirement
Success
Time
" 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. "
Niall Ferguson
Resources
Best
Way
" 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. "
Niall Ferguson
Friends
Work
Think
" In general, I have felt more at home in the U.S. than I ever felt in England. "
Niall Ferguson
General
Felt
England
" Oral history is a recipe for complete misrepresentation because almost no one tells the truth, even when they intend to. "
Niall Ferguson
Recipe
Almost
Because
" 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. "
Niall Ferguson
Quality
Life
Kings
" 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
" I'm over-industrious, so I don't feel quite such a deviant in America as I did in England. "
Niall Ferguson
America
Did
England
" 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
" 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
" 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