Quotes From "Civilization: The West And The Rest" By Niall Ferguson

1
There can be no understanding without that sympathy which puts us, through the imagination, and (another's) situation. Niall Ferguson
2
The bacteriologist, often risking his life to find cures for lethal afflictions, was another kind of imperial hero, as brave in his way as the soldier-explorer. Niall Ferguson
3
After 1968 the restored communist regime required all Czech rock musicians to sit a written exam in Marxism Leninism Niall Ferguson
4
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. Niall Ferguson
5
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. Niall Ferguson
6
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 private property rights, ensured by representative, constitutional government. Niall Ferguson
7
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. Niall Ferguson
8
The dead outnumber the living fourteen to one, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril Niall Ferguson
9
I wrote this book because I had formed a strong impression that the people currently living were paying insufficient attention to the dead. Niall Ferguson
10
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. Niall Ferguson
11
Not the last time in Western history, the revolutionaries armed themselves with a new religion to steel themselves for greater outrageous. Niall Ferguson
12
No civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear to itself, is indestructible. Niall Ferguson
13
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? Niall Ferguson
14
Institutions or products of culture. But they formalize a set of norms. Niall Ferguson