Niall Ferguson Quotes

Institutions or products of culture. But they formalize a set of norms.

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?

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

The ascent of money has been essential to the ascent of man.

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.

Historians are not scientists. They cannot (and should not even trying to) establish universal laws of social or political "physics" with reliable predictive powers. Why? Because there is no possibility of repeating the single, multi-millennium experiment that constant to the past. The sample size of human history is one.

The dead outnumber the living fourteen to one, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril

I wrote this book because I had formed a strong impression that the people currently living were paying insufficient attention to the dead.