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

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...

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

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.

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 of this we don’t understand how incredibly vulnerable it...

Oral history is a recipe for complete misrepresentation because almost no one tells the truth, even when they intend to.

Not the last time in Western history, the revolutionaries armed themselves with a new religion to steel themselves for greater outrageous.

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

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.

If the financial system has a defect, it is that it reflects and magnifies what we human beings are like. Money amplifies our tendency to overreact, to swing from exuberance when things are going well...

President Obama’s biggest weakness is weakness.

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.

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

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.

The ascent of money has been essential to the ascent of man.

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

Institutions or products of culture. But they formalize a set of norms.

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

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.

There can be no understanding without that sympathy which puts us, through the imagination, and (another’s) situation.

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

The real point of me isn’t that I’m good looking. It’s that I’m clever. I’ve got a brain! I would rather be called a highly intelligent historian than a gorgeous pouting one.

I can’t think of anything I would rather do with my money than buy my children the best possible education.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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...

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.

If being rightwing is thinking that Karl Marx’s doctrine was a catastrophe for humanity, then I’m rightwing.

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

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...

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.

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...

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

Civilisation is partly about restraining the male of the species from engaging in the violence of the hunter-gatherer period. But it doesn’t take an awful lot to unleash it.

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...

No civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear to itself, is indestructible.

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...

As a financial historian, I was quite isolated in Oxford – British historians are supposed to write about kings – so the quality of intellectual life in my field is much higher at Harvard. The...

The whole point about historians is that we are really communing with the dead. It’s very restful – because you read. There’s some sociopathic problem that makes me prefer it to human interaction.

I wrote this book because I had formed a strong impression that the people currently living were paying insufficient attention to the dead.

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?

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...

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...

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...

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