"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."

Literature

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Thematic Reflection

This quotation examines the core nature of Literature as articulated by Niall Ferguson. Within historical and literary traditions, reflections on Literature provide actionable mental models, challenging individuals to evaluate personal ethics, self-discipline, and daily actions.

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About Niall Ferguson

Sir Niall Campbell Ferguson is a British and American historian who is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. Previously, he was a professor at Harvard University, the London School of Economics, New York University, a visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities, and a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford. He was a visiting lecturer at the London School of Economics for the 2023/2024 academic year and at Tsinghua University in China from 2019 to 2020.

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More by Niall Ferguson

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

— Niall Ferguson
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"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."

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

— Niall Ferguson
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"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."

— Niall Ferguson
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More about Literature

"What that book does for me is give me the tools in the same way that I had the tools when I learned the regular scales or the alphabet. If you give me the tools, the syntax, and the grammar, it still doesn't tell me how to write Ulysses."

— David Baker
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"I'm not embarrassed about the novels I wrote when I was younger, but I couldn't write them today because of my religion."

— Louise Mensch
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"'London' is a gallery of sensation of impressions. It is a history of London in a thematic rather than a chronological sense with chapters of the history of smells, the history of silence, and the history of light. I have described the book as a labyrinth, and in that sense in complements my description of London itself."

— Peter Ackroyd
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"I've been drawing my whole life. My mom says my sister and I were drawing by age 1. Animation seems a real, natural extension of drawing as a way of telling a story visually."

— Jennifer Yuh Nelson
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