Niall Ferguson

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

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.

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

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

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.

I have three kids in Britain, and I am there at least once a month.

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.

I think the rise of quantitative econometrics and a highly mathematical approach to risk management was the obverse of a decline in interest in financial history.

My fundamental tenets are concerned with freedom of the individual; the market isn't perfect, but it's the best available way of allocating resources.

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

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.

We historians are increasingly using experimental psychology to understand the way we act. It is becoming very clear that our ability to evaluate risk is hedged by all sorts of cognitive biases. It's a miracle that we get anything right.