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41 " 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 centurions or Holocaust victims, not to write essays about why and how their predicaments arose. "
― Niall Ferguson , Civilization: The West and the Rest
42 " 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. "
― Niall Ferguson , The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
43 " 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 "
44 " 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. "
― Niall Ferguson , Kissinger: Vol 1: The Idealist, 1923-1968
45 " intellectual diversity is the form of diversity that seems to be least valued in universities, "
― Niall Ferguson , The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook
46 " 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. "
47 " biggest changes in history are the achievements of thinly documented, informally organized groups "
48 " The English language is the one thing the Commonwealth still has in common. "
― Niall Ferguson , Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World
49 " After 1500 not all roads led to Rome "
50 " 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 "
51 " Conceptio culpa Nasci pena Labor vita Necesse mori ‘Conception is sin, birth is pain, life is toil, death is inevitable. "
52 " the state of the future will need to function more like the human immune system "
53 " the secret of our success as a species ‘resides . . . in the collective brains of our communities "
54 " We must pose the familiar question about how far our civil liberties have been eroded by the national security state… Somehow it is always a choice between habeas corpus and hundreds of corpses. "
― Niall Ferguson , The Great Degeneration
55 " Since de Soto published The Mystery of Capital, revolutions in countries like Tunisia and Egypt have provided compelling evidence in support of his approach. He sees the ‘Arab Spring’ primarily as a revolt by frustrated would-be entrepreneurs against corrupt, rent-seeking regimes that preyed on their efforts to accumulate capital. The prime example is the story of the twenty-six-year-old "
56 " The German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, was one of the few authentic geniuses among nineteenth-century statesmen. "
57 " -- kulttuurien kamppailu Huntingtonin merkityksessä tuntuu edelleen kaukaiselta mahdollisuudelta. Pikemminkin näemme samankaltaisen siirroksen, joka 500 viime vuoden mittaan päättyi miltei aina lännen eduksi. Yksi sivilisaatio heikkenee, toinen vahvistuu. Ratkaiseva kysymys ei ole, ryhtyvätkö ne taistelemaan, vaan heilahtaako heikompi heikkoudesta suoranaiseen kaaokseen. "
58 " Sivilisaation ydin ovat tekstit, jotka sen kouluissa opetetaan, jotka sen oppilaat oppivat ja jotka muistetaan koettelemusten aikana. "
59 " Unlike in the past, there are now two kinds of people in the world: those who own and run the networks, and those who merely use them. "
60 " 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. "