143 Quotes by Niall Ferguson

You really struggle to be a successful empire if you are also the world’s biggest debtor.

Brexit was a dress rehearsal for the US presidential election of 2016. As in Britain, so in the United States, the political establishment took it for granted that the old ways would suffice.

British Empire acted as an agency for imposing free markets, the rule of law, investor protection and relatively incorrupt government on roughly a quarter of the world.

The British press has an insatiable appetite for making public things that should be private. It’s a prurience that I’ve never understood.

From Boston to Bordeaux, revolution was in large measure the achievement of networks of wordsmiths, the best of whom were also orators whose shouted words could rally the crowd in the square and incite them to storm the towers of the old regime.

The German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, was one of the few authentic geniuses among nineteenth-century statesmen.

Sometimes, as in the case of the American Revolution, crucial roles turn out to have been played by people who were not leaders but connectors.

I used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or a .400 baseball hitter,’ he told the Wall Street Journal. ‘But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.

Jews were emphatically second-class subjects of the Tsar. A Pale of Settlement, outside which Jews were not supposed to reside, had been established by Catherine II in 1791, though it was not precisely delineated until 1835. It consisted of Russian-controlled Poland.