143 Quotes by Niall Ferguson

No civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear to itself, is indestructible.

We must resist the temptation to romanticize history's losers.

Who killed Christianity in Europe? Was it, as (Max) Weber himself predicted, that the spirit of capitalism was bound to destroy the Protestant ethic parents, as materialism corrupted the original aestheticism of the godly?

The aim of Cold War competition in the third world was not to win a contest between rival models of economic development but above all to "fill(...) a spiritual void," for "even Communism has made many more converts through the theological quality of Marxism than through the materialistic aspect on which it prides itself.

The striking thing is that the transatlantic divergence in working patterns has coincided almost exactly with a comparable convergence in religiosity. Europeans not only work less; they also pray less – and believe less.

We should not delude ourselves into thinking that our historical narratives, as commonly constructed, are anything more than retrofits.

It was a war of evil against lesser evil.

Between 1980 and 2000 the number of patents registered in Israel was 7652 compared with 367 for all the Arab countries combined. In 2008 alone is really inventors applied to register 9591 new patents. The equivalent figure for Iran was 50 and for all majority Muslim countries in the world with 5657.

The biggest threat to Western civilization is posed not by other civilizations, but by our own pusillanimity — and by the historical ignorance that feeds it.