NIALL FERGUSON

The great thing about behavioural psychology and economics is that they help us to see that there are actually pretty good reasons why human beings swing from greed to fear, and why we're not really calculating machines or utility-maximisers.

Something that's seldom appreciated about me is that I am in sympathy with a great deal of what Marx wrote, except that I'm on the side of the bourgeoisie.

There aren't many people who really put their life on the line for human freedom.

The rise of the West is, quite simply, the pre-eminent historical phenomenon of the second half of the second millennium after Christ.

I can't imagine having a conversation about 'Celebrity Big Brother' in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The British press has an insatiable appetite for making public things that should be private. It's a prurience that I've never understood.

Over time, the welfare state has become dysfunctional in a surprising way. But in a way it became a victim of its own success: It became so successful at prolonging life, that it becomes financially unsustainable, unless you make major changes to things like retirement ages.

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.

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

It's great to see countries like China and India lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty by essentially copying Western ways of doing things.

Risk models are a substitute for historical knowledge, because they tend to work with just three years' worth of data. But three years is not a long time in financial history.

When I first came to Oxford, I struggled to feel comfortable in an Anglican, public school-dominated institution.

The debate that I'm interested in having is with seriously smart people about how we design institutions in the 21st century that will genuinely address problems of poverty and educational underachievement.

Only in England would 'professor gets divorced and remarried' be a story.

Through pure accident of birth, I've managed to stay relatively youthful.

I was never a very convincing social conservative, and always avoided associating myself with that part of the broader conservative movement.

I'm over-industrious, so I don't feel quite such a deviant in America as I did in England.

I would say I'm a 19th-century liberal, possibly even an 18th-century one.

Ask me not, 'Are you rightwing,' but ask me 'Are you a committed believer in individual freedom, the values of the enlightenment?' Then, yeah, if being rightwing means believing Adam Smith was right, both in the 'Wealth of Nations' and the 'Theory of Moral Sentiments,' then I'm rightwing.

It's not surprising so many people end up with credit-card debts. Saving for your retirement and buying a house are difficult things, and we don't educate people about them at all.

One of the main arguments that I make in my new book, 'The Great Degeneration,' is that the rule of law in the U.S. is becoming the rule of lawyers.

What's so seductive about the efficient markets hypothesis is that it applies nine years out of ten. A lot of the time it works. But when it stops working, you blow up.

In general, I have felt more at home in the U.S. than I ever felt in England.

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

President Obama's biggest weakness is weakness.