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Niall Ferguson
72 quotes
“Increasingly, I believe that the issue of migration will be seen by future historians as the fatal solvent of the EU. In their accounts Brexit will appear as merely an early symptom of the crisis. Their argument will be that a massive Völkerwanderung overwhelmed the project for European integration, exposing the weakness of the EU as an institution and driving voters back to national politics for solutions.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The EU melting pot is melting down", The Boston Globe (June 18, 2018).
“European centrists are deeply confused about immigration. Many, especially on the centre-left, want to have both open borders and welfare states. But the evidence suggests that it is hard to be Denmark with a multicultural society. The lack of social solidarity makes high levels of taxation and redistribution unsustainable.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The EU melting pot is melting down", The Boston Globe (June 18, 2018).
“Back when China and America were the best of friends — or at least when their economic relationship seemed almost symbiotic — and I came up with the idea of “Chimerica,” which unlike the rival “G2” had the advantage of being a pun on the word “chimera,” signalling that we didn’t think it could last. Well, Chimerica now looks well and truly dead. But what is taking its place? Cold Wok? Sweet and Sour War? The hunt for a catch-phrase continues. Actually, I’m not sure why I bother. In the end, it too will probably be Made in China.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From trade war to tech war", The Boston Globe (February 4, 2019).
“The rise of China is the great economic and political fact of our lifetime — a rude awakening for those of us who thought it was the fall of the Soviet Union. In 1951, China was an impoverished backwater with a revolutionary government that Joseph Stalin easily duped into fighting on his behalf in Korea. Today, thanks to the biggest and fastest industrial revolution in history, China is the superpower, Russia its junior partner.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Can the US balance China's power?", The Boston Globe (April 8, 2019).
“Trump is a demagogue and a would-be tyrant whose disregard for the rule of law and encouragement of sedition and insurrection have, very fortunately for us all, been thwarted by his own incompetence and, of course, the separation of powers and other constitutional checks the founders devised.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) first seen 2021 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: America Will Achieve Herd Immunity to Trumpism. I Hope", Bloomberg (January 10, 2021).
“I remember 1989 vividly, having spent much of that summer in Berlin before the Wall fell. And while largely peaceful revolutions swept through Central and Eastern Europe that year (it was only three years later, in Yugoslavia, that the death of Communism sparked war), there was no such turning point in China, where 1989 also saw the Tiananmen Square massacre. With the benefit of hindsight, the survival of Communism in China was a more significant historical phenomenon than its collapse east of the River .”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) first seen 2022 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We have seen very few years in history that have been truly pivotal. This could be one.", The Mail on Sunday (March 20, 2022).
“[[George H. W. Bush|[George H. W.] Bush]] was in many ways the maestro president when it came to foreign policy. With extraordinary dexterity, he handled the , the collapse of all the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, German reunification and then the Soviet disintegration. On his watch, Nelson Mandela was set free and apartheid consigned to the history books; and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait was reversed. And yet still the presidency was won by a scandal-prone Southern governor with the banal but brilliant slogan: "It’s the economy, stupid.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) first seen 2022 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Trends Are Bad, Events Are Worse, But ‘Trevents’ May Surprise Us", Bloomberg (October 2, 2022).
“There were Chernobyl-like features of the way that the United States handled the [Covid] pandemic, in particular the reluctance of the responsible officials ever to admit any responsibility for any of the things that went wrong.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) first seen 2024 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Are We Living in 'Late Soviet America'? Niall Ferguson and Jonah Goldberg Debate", (at around 45 minutes), Honestly with Bari Weiss (July 11, 2024).
“[On his comments on January 10, 2021 (above) about Trump as a "would-be tyrant"] I'm convinced that whatever impulses he has or has had in the past, the system can contain them as it was designed to.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I look back on January 6 as this combination of a genuine belief on his part [Trump] that the election was stolen and a catastrophic failure of policing that doesn't look entirely accidental. [...] We were all treated to a theatrical event with an amateur cast that really one would be stretching the English language to call a coup or even an attempted coup.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) first seen 2025 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Niall Ferguson: I was wrong to call Donald Trump a would-be tyrant", The Times (January 3, 2025).
“The reality is that [Donald] Trump won Davos, hands down. And not only did he win it; he owned it. I have never before seen a single individual so completely dominate this vast bazaar of the powerful, the wealthy, the famous, and the self-important.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the run-up to Davos 2026, Trump did his utmost to wind up Europe's elite, not to mention Canada's. On social media and in interviews, he insisted that he was determined to get Greenland for the United States.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is a deliberate tactic designed to leave counterparties uncertain. On this occasion, Trump was bluffing, and the administration never had the remotest intention of imposing new tariffs on Europe, much less taking military action to annex Greenland.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Between the early 1600s and the 1950s, more than 20 million people left the British Isles to begin new lives across the seas. Only a minority ever returned. No other country in the world came close to exporting so many of its inhabitants. In leaving Britain, the early emigrants risked not merely their life savings but their very lives. Their voyages were never without hazard; their destinations were often unhealthy and inhospitable. To us, their decision to gamble everything on a one-way ticket seems baffling. Yet without millions of such tickets – some purchased voluntarily, some not – there could have been no British Empire. For the indispensable foundation of the Empire was mass migration: the biggest in human history. This Britannic exodus changed the world. It turned whole continents white.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In all, around 100,000 Loyalists left the new United States bound for Canada, England or the West Indies. It has sometimes been argued that in gaining Canada in the Seven Years War, Britain had undermined her position in America. Without the French threat, why should the thirteen colonies stay loyal? Yet the loss of America had the unforeseen effect of securing Canada for the Empire, thanks to the flood of English-speaking Loyalists immigrants who would eventually reduce the French Quebecois to a beleaguered minority. The amazing thing is that so many people should have voted with their feet against American independence, choosing loyalty to King and Empire over ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Africa was in fact a great deal less primitive than they imagined.… However, in three respects it struck the Victorians as benighted. Unlike North Africa, the faiths of sub-Saharan Africa were not monotheistic; except for its northern and southern extremities, it was riddled with malaria, yellow fever and other diseases lethal to Europeans (and their preferred livestock); and, perhaps most importantly, slaves were its most important export – indeed, supplying slaves to European and Arab traders along the coast became the continent’s biggest source of revenue. The peculiar path of global economic development led Africans into the business of capturing and selling one another.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Livingstone had believed in the power of the Gospel; Stanley believed only in brute force. Livingstone have been appalled by slavery; Stanley would connive at its restoration. Above all, Livingstone had been indifferent to political frontiers; Stanley wanted to see Africa carved up. And so it was. In the time between Livingstone’s death in 1873 and Stanley’s death in 1904 around the third of Africa would be annexed to the British Empire; virtually all the rest would be taken over by a handful of other European powers. And it is only against this background of political domination that the conversion of sub-Saharan Africa to Christianity can be understood. Commerce, Civilization and Christianity were to be conferred on Africa, just as Livingstone had intended. But they would arrive in conjunction with a fourth ‘C’: Conquest.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Traditional accounts of ‘decolonization’ tend to give the credit (or the blame) to the nationalist movements within the colonies, from Sinn Fein in Ireland to Congress in India. The end of Empire is portrayed as a victory for ‘freedom fighters’, who took up arms from Dublin to Delhi to rid their peoples of the yoke of colonial rule. This is misleading. Throughout the twentieth century, the principal threats – and the most plausible alternatives – to British rule were not national independence movements, but other empires. These alternative empires were significantly harsher in their treatment of subject peoples than Britain.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Yet the nineteenth-century Empire undeniably pioneered free trade, free capital movements and, with the abolition of slavery, free labour. It invested immense sums in developing a global network of modern communications. It spread and enforced the rule of law over vast areas. Though it fought many small wars, the Empire maintained a global peace unmatched before or since. In the twentieth century too it more than justified its own existence, for the alternatives to British rule represented by the German and Japanese empires were clearly far worse. And without its Empire, it is inconceivable that Britain could have withstood them.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I watched the events in Washington last Wednesday, as a mob whipped into revolutionary fervor by President Donald Trump overran the Capitol in attempt to disrupt the congressional certification of the Electoral College’s votes, the final step in the constitutionally prescribed process of presidential election. It does not matter which foreign term you wish to use: coup, putsch, autogolpe — take your pick. Since Nov. 3, Trump has attempted to overturn the result of the presidential election he lost, using mafia tactics. ...On Wednesday, he not only egged on the mob; he later said he "loved" them for what they had done. This clearly violated his oath of office.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A defining feature of history is that there are many more black swans — not to mention what Didier Sornette calls “dragon kings,” events so large in scale that they lie beyond even a power-law distribution — than a normally distributed world would lead us to expect. All such events lie in the realm of uncertainty, not of calculable risk. Moreover, the world we have built has, over time, become an increasingly complex system prone to all kinds of random behavior, nonlinear relationships and “fat-tailed” distributions. A disaster such as a pandemic is not a single, discrete event. It invariably leads to other forms of disaster — economic, social and political. There can be, and often are, cascades or chain reactions of disaster. The more networked the world becomes, the more we see this.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) first seen 2021 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Next Global Disaster Is on Its Way, and We Aren’t Ready", Bloomberg (May 9, 2021).
“I disbelieve in both cycles of history and ends of history. History is the interaction of many complex systems. There are certain long-run processes (notably exponential gains in productivity through the development of technology and the “suprasecular” decline of nominal and real interest rates as a result of capital accumulation) punctuated by, well, one disaster after another. These disasters are either randomly distributed or follow a power law (i.e. there are lots of little earthquakes, pandemics or wars, but a few cataclysmic ones). At unpredictable intervals, the global system is tipped into a major transition by a disturbance that can be quite small, if not quite as small as Edward Lorenz’s famous butterfly in the Amazon setting off a tornado in Texas. Russia’s war in Ukraine — destructive certainly, but still a relatively small conflict by 20th-century standards — can be enough to trigger a “conflict avalanche.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) first seen 2022 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: America, China, Russia and the Avalanche of History", Bloomberg (May 20, 2022).