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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 7296777 | The Soul Brothers and Sister Lou and The Outsiders | Rita Williams-Garcia | ||
| 14e96df | Some problems can only be resolved by network analysis. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 65e3d8e | Russia's intelligence network did its utmost to damage his rival's reputation, | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 094c78b | 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. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 3761fc0 | 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. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| b70ce28 | Many historians still tend to assume that the spread of an idea or an ideology is a function of its inherent content in relation to some vaguely specified context. We must now acknowledge, however, that some ideas go viral because of structural features of the network through which they spread. They are least likely to do so in a hierarchical, top-down network, where horizontal peer-to-peer links are prohibited. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| acd74e2 | Had the Illuminati remained faithful to Weishaupt's original blueprint, they would long ago have been forgotten, if they had ever been heard of at all. The key to their growth and later notoriety was their infiltration of German Masonic lodges | Niall Ferguson | ||
| fcce64c | when set in its proper historical context, the present time appears less unnervingly unprecedented and more familiar. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 48bb9ad | Trump won 'Trumpland | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 5cb50fa | Ownership of real property is second only to ownership of intellectual property | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 8358717 | Is it better today to be in a network, which gives you influence, than in a hierarchy, which gives you power? | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 0c6c108 | resisting the temptation to build complexity when (as in the case of financial regulation) simplicity is a better option. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 0fb9b31 | The first 'networked era' followed the introduction of the printing press to Europe in the late fifteenth century and lasted until the end of the eighteenth century. The second -our own time -dates from the 1970s, though I argue that the technological revolution we associate with Silicon Valley was more a consequence than a cause of a crisis of hierarchical institutions. The intervening period, from the late 1790s until the late 1960s, saw .. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| d68e735 | Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite. Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fetes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; i.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| fe700d5 | Cities with at least one printing press in 1500 were significantly more likely to adopt Protestantism than cities without printing, but it was cities with multiple competing printers that were most likely to turn Protestant. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| bf14478 | The task assigned to the RAND* researcher Paul Baran in 1964 was to develop a communication system that would survive a Soviet nuclear attack. Baran suggested three possible structures for such a system. It could either be 'centralized', with one central hub and multiple spokes, 'decentralized', with multiple components linked loosely together by a number of weak ties, or 'distributed', like a lattice or mesh. In theory, the last option was.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| e352f99 | You ask professors to study things, but you never put them in charge of anything. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 374b519 | the Internet is merely 'the modern public square', | Niall Ferguson | ||
| f92cd86 | Technologies come and go. The world remains a world of squares and towers. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| bda242e | The first paradox of Illuminism, then, was that it was a network that craved an elaborate hierarchical structure, even as it inveighed against existing hierarchies. In his 1782 'Address to the newly promoted Illuminati dirigenti', Weishaupt set out his worldview. In the state of nature, man had been free, equal and happy; division into classes, private property, personal ambition and state formation had come later, as the 'great unholy main.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| eab4b3b | until the archives of the Masonic lodges became accessible, researchers were heavily reliant on memoirs and documents confiscated and published by the Order's foes. Amongst the materials said to have been in Franz Xaver Zwackh's possession were impressions of government seals to be used for counterfeiting, dissertations in defence of suicide, instructions for making poisonous gas and secret ink, a description of a special safe for the safeg.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| dfb7d26 | Drawing on the best modern scholarship, this book seeks to rescue the history of networks from the clutches of the conspiracy theorists, and to show that historical change often can and should be understood in terms of precisely such network-based challenges to hierarchical orders | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 1207453 | we cannot transmit ideas and behaviours much beyond our friends' friends' friends | Niall Ferguson | ||
| d144e1c | Giving the world's poor mobile telephony is proving easier than providing them with clean water - an argument, perhaps, for leaving the provision of clean water to the private sector rather than weak, corrupt governments. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 89dc26d | Usually an upbeat affair, the BCA conference in 2006 proved disturbing. Harvard professor Niall Ferguson asked a strange question: Why hadn't the recent assassination of a Russian central banker, a Thai coup d'etat, and a North Korean nuclear bomb test triggered a stock market rout? | Danielle DiMartino Booth | ||
| b466a76 | six degrees of the mathematician Paul Erdos, himself a pioneer of network theory, as we have seen.13 Recent research suggests the number is now closer to five than six, which suggests that technological change since the 1970s has perhaps been less transformative than is commonly supposed.14 For the directors of Fortune 1000 companies, however, it is 4.6.15 For Facebook users it was 3.74 in 2012,16 and just 3.57 in 2016. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 74ae063 | By the means of Telescopes, there is nothing so far distant but may be represented to our view; and by the help of Microscopes, there is nothing so small, as to escape our inquiry; hence there is a new visible World discovered to the understanding. By this means the Heavens are open'd, and a vast number of new Stars, and new Motions, and new Productions appear in them, to which all the ancient Astronomers were utterly Strangers. By this the.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 5d69908 | according to Christakis and Fowler, we cannot transmit ideas and behaviours much beyond our friends' friends' friends (in other words, across just three degrees of separation). This is because the transmission and reception of an idea or behaviour requires a stronger connection than the relaying of a letter (in the case of Milgram's experiment) or the communication that a certain employment opportunity exists. Merely knowing people is not t.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 0f42884 | first networked polity. 'In no country in the world,' declared Tocqueville, 'has the principle of association been more successfully used or applied to a greater multitude of objects than in America': | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 49eba94 | half of the American population agree with at least one conspiracy [theory] . . . Far from being an aberrant expression of some political extreme or a product of gross misinformation, a conspiratorial view of politics is a widespread tendency across the entire ideological spectrum . . . [M]any predominant belief systems in the United States, be they Christian narratives about God and Satan . . . or left-wing narratives about neoliberalism ... | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 3f5756a | 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. | history west western-civilization western-culture | Niall Ferguson | |
| 8ed0c7f | Stalin's power consisted of three distinct elements: total control of the party bureaucracy, total control of the means of communication - with the Kremlin telephone network as the central hub - and total control of a secret police staffed by men who themselves lived in fear. No Oriental despot had wielded such complete personal power over an empire, because no previous hierarchy had been able to make participation in unofficial networks - .. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 7cf62c3 | In July 1900, at the time of the intervention against the Boxers, between 3,000 and 5,000 Chinese were drowned at Blagoveshchensk when they were forced by whip-wielding Cossacks and local Russian police to swim across the wide and fast-flowing Amur to the Chinese side. No boats were provided and those who resisted or refused to get in the water were shot or cut down with sabres. This little-known incident, a harbinger of so many twentieth-c.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| cbfac21 | What the complacent Russians forgot was that their strengths - above all, their technological superiority - were not a permanent monopoly conferred by Providence on people with white skin. There was in fact nothing biological to prevent Asians from adopting Western forms of economic and political organization, nor from replicating Western inventions. The first Asian country to work out how to do so was Japan. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 3ff8769 | From 1500, anyone in China found building a ship with more than two masts was liable to the death penalty; in 1551 it became a crime even to go to sea in such a ship.21 The records of Zheng He's journeys were destroyed. Zheng He himself died and was almost certainly buried at sea. What | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 60fe7b7 | It was a war of evil against lesser evil. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| c114ef5 |
En ambas economias el caos fiscal se aunaba con la inflacion rampante, que en Alemania evocaba la hiperinflacion de 1923.Y ?no habia sido Hitler el < |
Niall Ferguson | ||
| 5b39551 | In marked contrast, Ottoman scientific progress was non-existent in this same period. The best explanation for this divergence was the unlimited sovereignty of religion in the Muslim world. Towards the end of the eleventh century, influential Islamic clerics began to argue that the study of Greek philosophy was incompatible with the teachings of the Koran.32 | Niall Ferguson | ||
| b95e838 | No one can know the future, least of all, a historian, whose business is the past. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| e080ac2 | In the 1990s the world's population for the first time exceeded six billion, more than three times what it had been when the First World War broke out. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 034f3b5 | Elias Canetti once tried to imagine a world in which 'all weapons [were] abolished and in the next war only biting [was] allowed'. Can we be sure there would be no genocides in such a radically disarmed world? | Niall Ferguson | ||
| a7e2141 | The Russian commander whose ship was torpedoed by SMS Emden off Penang on October 28, 1914, was certainly unprepared for the new age of global conflict. Only twelve rounds of ammunition were ready on deck; but there were sixty Chinese prostitutes below. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 9b9ceb6 | Some [surrendering Germans] would crawl on their knees,' recalled one British soldier, 'holding a picture of a woman or a child in their hands above their heads but everyone was killed. The excitement was gone. We killed in cold blood because it was our duty to kill as much as we could. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 430c371 | 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 resurgent China guided by Japan'. | Niall Ferguson |