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0eb9b43
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The ascent of money has been essential to the ascent of man.
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money
history
financial-history
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Niall Ferguson |
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a52c3bc
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there really is no such thing as 'the future', singular. There are only multiple, unforeseeable futures, which will never lose their capacity to take us by surprise.
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Niall Ferguson |
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5132336
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No civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear to itself, is indestructible.
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overconfidence
civilization
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Niall Ferguson |
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8ba5270
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It was an idea that made the crucial difference between British and Iberian America - an idea about the way people should govern themselves. Some people make the mistake of calling that idea 'democracy' and imagining that any country can adopt it merely by holding elections. In reality, democracy was the capstone of an edifice that had as its foundation the rule of law - to be precise, the sanctity of individual freedom and the security of ..
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republic
us-history
government
democracy
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Niall Ferguson |
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d07c499
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The real social contract, (Edmund Burke) argued, was not Rousseau's social contract between the noble savage and the General Will, but a "partnership" between the present generation and future generations."
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responsibility
legacy
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Niall Ferguson |
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737e5d8
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Was there something distinctive about American civil society that gave democracy a better chance than in France, as Tocqueville argued? Was the already centralized French state more likely to produce a Napoleon than the decentralized United States? We cannot be sure. But it is not unreasonable to ask how long the US constitution would have lasted if the United States had suffered the same military and economic strains that swept away the Fr..
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Niall Ferguson |
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232c3fd
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American Empire- it is an empire that lacks the drive to export its capital, its people and its culture to those backward regions which need them most urgently and which, if they are neglected, will breed the greatest threats to its security. It is an empire, in short, that dare not speak its name. It is an empire in denial.
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Niall Ferguson |
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b2bf17e
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What makes a civilization real to its inhabitants, in the end, is not just the splendid edifices at it centre, nor even the smooth functioning of the institutions they house. At its core, a civilization is the texts that are taught in its schools, learned by its students and recollected in times of tribulation.
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education
heritage
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Niall Ferguson |
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fea5491
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The dead outnumber the living fourteen to one, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril
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perspective
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Niall Ferguson |
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0d92315
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perennial truths of financial history. Sooner or later every bubble bursts. Sooner or later the bearish sellers outnumber the bullish buyers. Sooner or later greed turns to fear.
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Niall Ferguson |
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909a414
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After 1968 the restored communist regime required all Czech rock musicians to sit a written exam in Marxism Leninism
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influence
culture
propaganda
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Niall Ferguson |
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d8feb9f
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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.
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science
israel
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Niall Ferguson |
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e0a38eb
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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. It is the story at the very heart of modern history. It is perhaps the most challenging riddle historians have to solve. And we should solve it not merely to satisfy our curiosity. For it is only by identifying the true causes of Western ascendancy that we can hope to estimate with any degree of accuracy the..
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Niall Ferguson |
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6a93207
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The result is one of the greatest paradoxes of modern history: that an economic system designed to offer infinite choice to the individual has ended up homogenizing humanity.
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Niall Ferguson |
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c78d23d
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I, the British Empire began as a primarily economic phenomenon, its growth powered by commerce and consumerism. The demand for sugar drew merchants tot he carribean. British were not the first Empire builders. They were IMERIAL IMMITATORS!
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Niall Ferguson |
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1f27ae8
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The Japanese had no idea what elements of Western culture and institutions where the crucial ones, so they ended up copying everything, from western clothes and hair styles to the European practice of colonizing foreign people. Unfortunately, they took up empire-building at precisely the moment when the cost of imperialism began to exceed the benefits.
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distinction
originality
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Niall Ferguson |
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8783f8e
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we shall quickly find ourselves about as important to the algorithms as animals currently are to us.
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Niall Ferguson |
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08ef404
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In a time of chaos, it is the micro-manager who ascends
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Niall Ferguson |
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b6da437
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simple point is that institutions are to humans what hives are to bees. They are the structures within which we organize ourselves as groups. You know when you are inside one, just as a bee knows when it is in the hive. Institutions have boundaries, often walls. And, crucially, they have rules.
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Niall Ferguson |
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4cc91bf
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Because of preferential attachment, most social networks are profoundly inegalitarian.
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Niall Ferguson |
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6e7a1d8
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So I was a punk out of frustration. But I became a Tory out of hope.
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Niall Ferguson |
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f7d77be
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The financial world has been staggering under a series of blows such as the delicate system of international credit has never before witnessed, or even imagined... Nothing so widespread and so world-wide has ever been known before. Nothing...could have testified more clearly to the impossibility of running modern civilisation and war together than this...collapse of prices, produced not by the actual outbreak of a small war, but by fear of ..
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Niall Ferguson |
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aa08363
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Indeed, there were those who maintained that Russia's defeat at the hands of the Japanese was itself the result of a Jewish conspiracy. According to S. A. Nilus, a secret Jewish council known as the Sanhedrin had hypnotized the Japanese into believing they were one of the tribes of Israel; it was the Jews' aim, Nilus insisted, 'to set a distraught Russia awash with blood and to inundate it, and then Europe, with the yellow hordes of a resur..
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Niall Ferguson |
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d4a8a2f
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Ashkenazi
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Niall Ferguson |
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ace269e
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in response to discrimination and persecution in the Holy Roman Empire. They had moved further east into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and, despite the violence directed against them during the 1648 Ukrainian revolt, had continued this eastward pattern of migration and settlement into the eighteenth century. With the partitions of Poland, the areas of densest Jewish settlement came under Russian rule,
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Niall Ferguson |
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56a16e0
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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
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Niall Ferguson |
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f6a17c5
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Americans could once boast proudly that their system set the benchmark for the world; the United States was the rule of law. But now what we see is the rule of lawyers, which is something different.
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Niall Ferguson |
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65792b2
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There is in fact no such thing as the future, singular; only futures, plural. There are multiple interpretations of history, to be sure, none definitive - but there is only one past. And although the past is over, for two reasons it is indispensable to our understanding of what we experience today and what lies ahead of us tomorrow and thereafter.
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Niall Ferguson |
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329bbb5
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Large numbers of under-capitalized banks were a recipe for financial instability, and panics were a regular feature of American economic life - most spectacularly in the Great Depression, when a major banking crisis was exacerbated rather than mitigated by a monetary authority that had been operational for little more than fifteen years.
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Niall Ferguson |
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9e832ec
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The Armenian genocide was a horrific illustration of the convulsions that could seize a multi-ethnic polity trying to mutate from empire into nation state.
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Niall Ferguson |
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2c461b6
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To my mind, a civilization is much more than just the contents of a few first-rate art galleries. It is a highly complex human organization. Its paintings, statues and buildings may well be its most eye-catching achievements, but they are unintelligible without some understanding of the economic, social and political institutions which devised them, paid for them, executed them - and preserved them for our gaze.
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Niall Ferguson |
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a27325c
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No serious writer would claim that the reign of Western civilization was unblemished. Yet there are those who would insist that there was nothing whatever good about it. This position is absurd.
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Niall Ferguson |
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912fd14
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For roughly thirty years, young people at Western schools and universities have been given the idea of a liberal education, without the substance of historical knowledge. They have been taught isolated 'modules', not narratives, much less chronologies. They have been trained in the formulaic analysis of document excerpts, not in the key skill of reading widely and fast. They have been encouraged to feel empathy with imagined Roman centurion..
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Niall Ferguson |
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ef8b48e
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Although the court recognizes his right to insist on his bond - to claim his pound of flesh - the law also prohibits him from shedding Antonio's blood.
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Niall Ferguson |
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df9dcee
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One difficulty is that we cannot always reconstruct the past thoughts of these non-Western peoples, for not all of them existed in civilizations with the means of recording and preserving thought. In the end, history is primarily the study of civilizations, because without written records the historian is thrown back on spearheads and pot fragments, from which much less can be inferred. The
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Niall Ferguson |
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b7ace84
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Machiavelli asks "whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved?" He answers that "one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, it is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with." --
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Niall Ferguson |
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74d39af
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intellectual diversity is the form of diversity that seems to be least valued in universities,
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Niall Ferguson |
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bb22b50
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poverty is not the result of rapacious financiers exploiting the poor. It has much more to do with the lack of financial institutions, with the absence of banks, not their presence. Only when borrowers have access to efficient credit networks can they escape from the clutches of loan sharks, and only when savers can deposit their money in reliable banks can it be channelled from the idle rich to the industrious poor.
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Niall Ferguson |
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d959dfa
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Not the last time in Western history, the revolutionaries armed themselves with a new religion to steel themselves for greater outrageous.
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theology
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Niall Ferguson |
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726b929
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biggest changes in history are the achievements of thinly documented, informally organized groups
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Niall Ferguson |
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b3e7c62
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The English language is the one thing the Commonwealth still has in common.
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Niall Ferguson |
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30033fc
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After 1500 not all roads led to Rome
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Niall Ferguson |
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b2fdb8f
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News of the Indian Mutiny had taken forty-six days to reach London in 1857, travelling at an effective speed of 3.8 miles an hour. News of the huge Nobi earthquake in Japan in 1891 took a single day, travelling at 246 miles an hour, sixty-five times faster.50
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Niall Ferguson |
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34b073f
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Conceptio culpa Nasci pena Labor vita Necesse mori 'Conception is sin, birth is pain, life is toil, death is inevitable.
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Niall Ferguson |