Niall Ferguson Quotes

It used to be said that you had to know what was happening in America because it gave us a glimpse of our future. Today, the rest of America, and after that Europe, had better heed what happens in California, for it already reveals the type of civilisation that is in store for all of us.

I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.

The future of the West is not a limitless tending upwards and onwards for all time towards our presents ideals, but a single phenomenon of history, strictly limited and defined as to form and duration, which covers a few centuries

Europeans want America to be like Europe. But America will never be like Europe. She is the daughter of Europe but she left home when 18 years old and never came back.

America…could within twenty years bring us to a degree of development which Turks, left to themselves, would not be able to achieve in a century. It would make Turkey prosperous, rich and happy and turn Turks into a strong and civilized nation.

We are destined to be a barrier against the return of ignorance and barbarism. Old Europe will have to lean on our shoulders, and to hobble along by our side, under the monkish trammels of priests and kings, as she can. What a colossus shall we be when the southern continent comes up to our mark! What a stand will it seem as a ralliance for the reason and freedom of the globe!

Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions

The model of modern Western civilization is the virus: the pure bit of information, which turns its environment into endless reproductions of itself.

The process by which civilization, as an abstract entity distinct from the societies in which it is embodied, dies or is reborn is a very significant one.

As civilization advances, man grows unconscious of the primitive elements of life; he is separated from them by his perfection of material techniques.

History has been conceived--and with high justification in the records--as the human struggle for civilization against barbarism in different ages and places, from the beginning of human societies.

The people of the United States have been fortunate in many things. One of the things in which we have been most fortunate has been that so far, due perhaps to certain basic virtues in our traditional ways of doing things, we have managed to keep the crisis of western civilization, which has devastated the rest of the world and in which we are as much involved as anybody, more or less at arm's length.

Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent

Were civilization itself to be estimated by some of its results, it would seem perhaps better for what we call the barbarous part of the world to remain unchanged.

America became a great civilization thanks to a culture based on the value of having to earn almost everything an American got in life. As it abandons this value, it will become a mediocre civilization. And eventually it will not be America. It will be a large Sweden, and just as influential as the smaller one.

Civilization in certain respects is as inadequate as it was a thousand years ago.

The western nations of Europe, who now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors, and stand at the summit of civilization, owe little or none of their superiority to direct inheritance from the old Greeks, though they owe much to the written works of that wonderful people.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

America is the greatest force for good in the history of the world.

Civilization is not an incurable disease, but it should never be forgotten that the English people are at present afflicted by it.

Western Civilization has been in a state of decline since the Edwardian age, say 1910. That was the height of Greco-Roman European civilization. Then there was the First World War. That was the beginning of the end. That civilization has been in a decline ever since. But from the American triumphalist point of view our wonderful electronic revolution is really the forefront of an ongoing wonderful civilization.

Potentially, America is really the greatest, but it's not yet, I don't think. It's too much like an old-fashioned empire, waving the stick and dropping too many bombs on too many people.

A big chunk of Western civilization, consciously or otherwise, has given the impression that it's dying to surrender to somebody, anybody. Reasonably enough, Islam figures: Hey, why not us?

There is no salvation for us but to adopt Civilization and lift ourselves down to its level.

The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.