well-us-west-high-incomes-cushy-lives-immoral-sovereignty-another-state-effect

It's all very well for us to sit here in the west with our high incomes and cushy lives, and say it's immoral to violate the sovereignty of another state. But if the effect of that is to bring people in that country economic and political freedom, to raise their standard of living, to increase their life expectancy, then don't rule it out.

Niall Ferguson
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Niall Ferguson's Popular Quotes

The law of unintended consequences is the only real law of history.

- Niall Ferguson

The West may collapse very suddenly. Complex civilizations do that, because they operate, most of the time, on the edge of chaos.

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As a teacher, my strategy is to encourage questioning. I'm the least authoritarian professor you'll ever meet.

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So much of liberalism in its classical sense is taken for granted in the west today and even disrespected. We take freedom for granted, and because o…

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If young men have jobs - or the prospects of jobs - they are less likely to take up arms, they are less likely to join the resistance.

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A historian is battling all the time to remember as much as possible.

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It’s our generation that is witnessing the end of Western predominance. The average American used to be more than 20 times richer than the average Ch…

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All empires have depended on local legitimacy and local collaboration; they are not based primarily on coercion. An imperial rule that relies wholly …

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I think that it is important to be gregarious, and that friendships are not just a leisure pursuit, that they are an integral part of what it is to b…

- Niall Ferguson
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