Niall Quotes & Sayings

They are the key components of our civilization. I want to show that inside these political, economic, legal and social black boxes are highly complex sets of interlocking institutions. Like the circuit boards inside your computer or your smartphone, it is these institutions that make the gadget work. And if it stops working, it is probably because of a defect in the institutional wiring. You cannot understand what is wrong just by looking at the shiny casing. You need to look inside. — Niall Ferguson

So the cluviel dor was a test of Eric's sincerity, in Niall's eyes. And the cluviel dor was a test of my love for Eric, in Eric's eyes," I said. "And we both failed the test. — Charlaine Harris

they sought, from their earliest days, to use their financial leverage over individual states to improve the legal and political position of the Jews living there. — Niall Ferguson

People are odd creations, this is my theme. — Niall Williams

The dog is all things to all men. — Ian Niall

I've had stupid teachers, lazy teachers, boring teachers, teachers who were teachers because their parents were and they hadn't the imagination to think of anything else, teachers who were teachers because of cowardice, because of fear, because of the holidays, because of the pensions, because they were never called to account, never had to actually be any good, ones who could not survive in any other profession, who were not aware they had trod on butterflies. But none of those compared to Mr Maurice Crossan. He was the one who first stamped on my brother's soul. He was dark, as they say here. For those who want more of him visit the dark character of Orlick Dolge in Great Expectations and cross that with a ginger-headed weasel. — Niall Williams

I'd rather be a boy and play with paper airplanes, then be a man and play with a woman's heart. -Niall Horan — One Direction

The reality, then, was that Indian nationalism was fuelled not by the impoverishment of the many but by the rejection of the privileged few. — Niall Ferguson

Queuing tips for fans: wrap up and bring food! — Niall Horan

And in just this way the days after my father's death became weeks became months in the familiar ceaseless cruelty of time, carrying us ever forward even when we sit still. Time does not pass, pain grows. (p.223) — Niall Williams

He spoke on rising toes, on rolling ankles, he spoke with forward tilt, with lifted shoulders, with forefinger pointing and fist punching. He did verbal pirouettes, he did elongated sentences, he let clauses gather at the river and foam until they found spittle release. He spoke hushed, he spoke his big points in whispers, then drove them in with urgent balletic waves of arm and extended eyebrow as he said the same thing again only louder. He was not then a guns and bombs nationalist. He was the more dangerous kind. He was a poems and stories one. — Niall Williams

My fealty to the Summer Court is rescinded. You are my King no more. — Melissa Marr

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

Somehow no really terrible Western ideas like, say, witch-burning or communism ever get mentioned, though they seem just as plausibly the products of Judaeo-Christian culture as the spirit of capitalism. In any case, while culture may instil norms, institutions create incentives. Britons versed in much the same culture behaved very differently depending on whether they emigrated to New England or worked for the East India Company in Bengal. In the former case we find inclusive institutions, in the latter extractive ones. — Niall Ferguson

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 experiment that constant to the past. The sample size of human history is one. — Niall Ferguson

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

We cut up lemons on a chop board because they are good for our voices. — Niall Horan

there really is no such thing as 'the future', singular. There are only multiple, unforeseeable futures, which will never lose their capacity to take us by surprise. — Niall Ferguson

a South American mercenary who served as Inspector General of the Turkish forces in Armenia, reported that the Governor-General of the province had ordered the local authorities in Adil Javus 'to exterminate all Armenian males of twelve years of age and over'. — Niall Ferguson

The boys that lose our directioners are so stupid, they will never find such beautiful girls in the whole entire world. — Niall Horan

Human beings are not seamless smooth creations, they have insoluble parts, and the closer you look the more mysterious they become. — Niall Williams

Everyone deserves to feel good about themselves, and if you don't then start because everyone is beautiful. — Niall Horan

Can clearly say Vegemite is horrible! Like tryin' new stuff though. — Niall Horan

Anyone who is funny and doesn't take herself to seriously is attractive to me — Niall Horan

My father revisited Moby a lot. Maybe it's because there's no other novel in the whole world that better captures the Impossible Standard. — Niall Williams

In Stalin's Russia racial persecution was often disguised as class warfare. More than 1.5 million members of ethnic minorities died as a result of forced resettlement. — Niall Ferguson

The Japanese experience, when a conscious effort by the central bank to prick an asset bubble ended up triggering an 80 per cent stock market sell-off and a decade of economic stagnation. — Niall Ferguson

I'd rather go to sleep than find a girl. — Niall Horan

Men are private. This I have learned. They are whole continents of privacy; you can only go to the borders; you can look in but you cannot enter. — Niall Williams

Women carry on. They endure the way old ships do, breasting into outrageous waters, ache and creak, hull holed and decks awash, yet find anchorage in the ordinary, in tables to be wiped down, pots to scrub, and endless ashes to be put out. — Niall Williams

American Empire- it is an empire that lacks the drive to export its capital, its people and its culture to those backward regions which need them most urgently and which, if they are neglected, will breed the greatest threats to its security. It is an empire, in short, that dare not speak its name. It is an empire in denial. — Niall Ferguson

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 to deep depression when they go wrong. Booms and busts are products, at root, of our emotional volatility. — Niall Ferguson

I'm not of a science background, I was never a comic book geek, and I was never a gamer. — Niall Matter

Money is a matter of belief, even faith: belief in the person paying us; belief in the person issuing the money he uses or the institution that honours his cheques or transfers. Money is not metal. It is trust inscribed. And it does not seem to matter much where it is inscribed: on silver, on clay, on paper, on a liquid crystal display. — Niall Ferguson

When bond prices fall, interest rates soar, with painful consequences for all borrowers. — Niall Ferguson

The idea was to reinvent mortgages by bundling thousands of them together as the backing for new and alluring securities that could be sold as alternatives to traditional government and corporate bonds - in short, to convert mortgages into bonds. — Niall Ferguson

The dead outnumber the living fourteen to one, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril — Niall Ferguson

Under the Convention of Chuenpi, signed in January 1841 (but then repudiated by the Emperor), Hong Kong became a British possession. — Niall Ferguson

Elias Canetti once tried to imagine a world in which 'all weapons [were] abolished and in the next war only biting [was] allowed'. Can we be sure there would be no genocides in such a radically disarmed world? — Niall Ferguson

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. — Niall Ferguson

Jimmy Mack said she had Gone-into-Teaching because it was the only place where she could rule without reprisal; where she could give free rein to the awesome dimension of her need to crush things. Mr. Conheedy it seemed had enjoyed this for the first three months of their marriage, but then had run off, Nan said to try and find a female Mrs. Conheedy next time around. — Niall Williams

Americans could once boast proudly that their system set the benchmark for the world; the United States was the rule of law. But now what we see is the rule of lawyers, which is something different. — Niall Ferguson

From his father, Gansey had gotten a head for logic, an affection for research, and a trust fund the size of most state lotteries. From their father, the Lynch brothers had gotten indefatigable egos, a decade of obscure Irish music instrument lessons, and the ability to box like they meant it. Niall Lynch had not been around very much, but when he had been, he had been an excellent teacher. — Maggie Stiefvater

I read them all, read them one by one with a kind of constant hunger as if they were apples that fed and made you hungry at the same time. — Niall Williams

No one is quite what he seems, Niall," he said. "That is one of the laws of life. — Charles Brady

Everyone gets that second album syndrome. — Niall Horan

I'll always defend the people I Love. — Niall Horan

And you, Ronan," Niall said. He always said Ronan differently from other words. As if he had meant to say another word entirely - something like knife or poison or revenge - and then swapped it out for Ronan's name at the last moment. "When you were born, the rivers dried up and the cattle in Rockingham County wept blood. — Maggie Stiefvater

the air was filled with obscure ideas — Niall Ferguson

The Four Black Boxes To demonstrate that Western institutions have indeed degenerated, I am going to have to open up some long-sealed black boxes. The first is the one labelled 'democracy'. The second is labelled 'capitalism'. The third is 'the rule of law'. And the fourth is 'civil society'. Together, — Niall Ferguson

His home was populated by things and creatures from Niall Lynch's dreams, and his mother was just another one of them — Maggie Stiefvater

Hope may or may not be a Thing with Feathers. But it's definitely a Thing with Claws. — Niall Williams

Niall Quinn is a creep. The man's an idiot, a Mother Theresa. — Eamon Dunphy

I look grey. I actually do. Mirrors should be banned, the same way Uncle Noelie banned the News. Both are enemies of hope. Uncle Noelie said he couldn't take listening to the wall-to-wall Doom experts who were the Boom experts before, most of them like a dark neighbour secretly delighted to be part of an important funeral, and so, because the time called for extreme tactics and because your heart has to be sustained by something, he switched over to Lyric FM for Marty in the Morning and shook hands with Mozart. But you can't switch off the mirror, it's right there over the bathroom sink, it's hard to avoid, and in it I'm grey. — Niall Williams

Why did the mushroom go to the party?
Because he's a fungi! — One Direction

Writing is a sickness only cured by writing. — Niall Williams

It was misconceived because Johnson appeared to think the kind of tactics that worked in a Texas saloon would work in Vietnam: beat a man, then stop beating him and say, Give in, or I'll beat you some more. — Niall Ferguson

Transcendence is the business of poets. That's what they're for. They're not like you and me. They have that extra bit that's always ready for take-off. Poets understand why God didn't give us wings: he wanted entertainment. He wanted us to aspire, to ascend. He wanted poetry. My — Niall Williams

After 1968 the restored communist regime required all Czech rock musicians to sit a written exam in Marxism Leninism — Niall Ferguson

If I am alive this is my book, and my father lives now in the afterlife that is a book, a thing not vague or virtual but something you can hold and feel and smell because to my mind heaven like life must be a thing sensual and real. And my book will be a river and have the Salmon literal and metaphoric leaping inside it and be called History of the Rain, so that his book does not perish, and you will know my book exists because of him and because of his books and his aspiration to leap up, to rise. You will know that I found him in his books, in the covers his hands held, the pages they turned, in the paper and the print, but also in the worlds those books contained, where now I have been and you have been too. You will know the story goes from the past to the present and into the future, and like a river flows. — Niall Williams

Someone told me the smile on my face gets bigger when I play the guitar. — Niall Horan

Conceptio culpa Nasci pena Labor vita Necesse mori 'Conception is sin, birth is pain, life is toil, death is inevitable. — Niall Ferguson

I feel I am a little bit older. Reckon I will start growing a beard next week. — Niall Horan

As masters of the bond market, the Rothschilds were already more feared than loved. Reactionaries on the Right lamented the rise of a new form of wealth, higher-yielding and more liquid than the landed estates of Europe's aristocratic elites. As Heinrich Heine discerned, there was something profoundly revolutionary about the financial system the Rothschilds were creating: — Niall Ferguson

I think our fans are a bit like us - they're very fun, like to have a laugh, like to party. I think that's what comes across on our album as well. It's very fun. It's music that you could play at a party, but it also deals with teenage relationships. — Niall Horan

He knows I have a soft spot for RLS and not just because he was sick or because we have the same initials but because there's something impossibly romantic about him and because before he started writing Treasure Island he first drew a map of an unknown island and because he believed in invisible places and was one of the last writers to know what the word adventure means. I could give you a hundred reasons why RLS is The Man. Look in his The Art of Writing (Book 683, Chatto & Windus, London) where he says that no living people have had the influence on him as strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind. Or when he says his greatest friend is D'Artagnan from The Three Musketeers (Book 5, Regent Classics, London). RLS said: 'When I suffer in mind, stories are my refuge, I take them like opium.' And when you read Treasure Island you feel you are casting off. That's the thing. You are casting off and leaving behind the ordinary dullness of the world. — Niall Williams

There were families everywhere, loose loud chains of them wandering down the streets, in and out of shops, young children with rings of ice-cream round their mouths and saddles of freckles across their noses. — Niall Williams

The German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, was one of the few authentic geniuses among nineteenth-century statesmen. — Niall Ferguson

Let's go to Nando's! — Niall Horan

When my father first took me to Ennis Library I went down among the shelves and felt company, not only the company of writers, but the readers too, because they had lifted and opened and read these books. The books were worn in a way they can only get worn by hands and eyes and minds — Niall Williams

I want to sell out arenas and make an album and work with some of the best artists in the world. — Niall Horan

Sleep 'til you're hungry, eat 'til you're sleepy. — Niall Horan

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. — Niall Ferguson

I actually haven't been on many dates, but I like just chilling around at home and watching a movie with a girl. — Niall Horan

There are only three great puzzles in the world, the puzzle of love, the puzzle of death, and, between each of these and part of both of them, the puzzle of God. God is the greatest puzzle of all. — Niall Williams

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 is the texts that are taught in its schools, learned by its students and recollected in times of tribulation. — Niall Ferguson

Indeed, there were those who maintained that Russia's defeat at the hands of the Japanese was itself the result of a Jewish conspiracy. According to S. A. Nilus, a secret Jewish council known as the Sanhedrin had hypnotized the Japanese into believing they were one of the tribes of Israel; it was the Jews' aim, Nilus insisted, 'to set a distraught Russia awash with blood and to inundate it, and then Europe, with the yellow hordes of a resurgent China guided by Japan'. The — Niall Ferguson

was open the windows. It could be — Niall Williams

After the creation of credit by banks, the birth of the bond was the second great revolution in the ascent of money. — Niall Ferguson

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

If you were six when you came here, and you are now...," he said, and paused as if waiting for her to fill in her age.

She signed as she thought the matter over.

"Are you still awake, Anora?"

"I was counting."

After much silence, Niall said, "Dinna you know how to count?"

"Of course I know how to count. How would I be able to keep track of my sheep if I did not know how to count?... — Terry Spear

When he was small he held the label inside his pillowcase when he slept. Only I know that. I was not a sleeper. His hand in sleep searched to find it. He would take the label between thumb and forefinger and just move it slightly against itself, over and back, as if the smallest friction was sufficient, as if with that he knew he was still in the world. — Niall Williams

The nobleman fell to his knees. 'Sir, come down to my son ere he die.'
His old face. His love for his son.
None of us spoke, the old man kneeling so.
I watched your eyes. The pity that pooled, this love of the father.
'Go thy way; thy son lives,' you said.
And he raised his face to you, and we could see that he believed. — Niall Williams

I'd date a fan as long as she didn't scream in my face. — Niall Horan

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

Was already different because I was a twin. Funny how you can say that: I am a twin. Not I am one of twins, but I actually am A Twin. Like there's two of me all the time, this other one right here beside me whether you can see him or not. Or as if you're saying, I'm a Half. — Niall Williams

Just as Hitler had predicted, it was rival empires more than indigenous nationalists who propelled the process of decolonization forward. — Niall Ferguson

All empires have depended on local legitimacy and local collaboration; they are not based primarily on coercion. An imperial rule that relies wholly on coercion can't endure. It's too expensive. — Niall Ferguson

A man and his dog goes so well with home and castle. — Ian Niall

It was said that his decision to have his papers burnt was a defence against biographers. He had read a life of one of the archbishops of Dublin, Dr William Walsh, and thought it a travesty of the man he had known. No one would do that to him; no one would analyse the mind and heart of Daniel Mannix. It would be bad enough if they got it wrong. And for him, it might have been almost as bad if they got it right. — Brenda Niall

My turn?" asks the blond from behind me. "Didn't you say she deserved a good spanking for her recent misdemeanours Mike?"
His voice has taken on a husky, carnal quality since our introduction at the bench, and I suspect there is another hard cock waiting for me. I struggle impatiently at the thought.
"Absolutely Niall," Mike replies, "but not here. I want her punished in public, to make sure she remembers the lesson. Sean, pull in at the next layby will you ... — Felicity Brandon

In the 1990s the world's population for the first time exceeded six billion, more than three times what it had been when the First World War broke out. — Niall Ferguson

Between 1980 and 2000 the number of patents registered in Israel was 7652 compared with 367 for all the Arab countries combined. In 2008 alone is really inventors applied to register 9591 new patents. The equivalent figure for Iran was 50 and for all majority Muslim countries in the world with 5657. — Niall Ferguson

I started off as a director, so when I see other actors directing, it gives me hope that maybe they'll put me into that position at some point, too. — Niall Matter

They dug up so much silver to pay for their wars of conquest that the metal itself dramatically declined in value - that is to say, in its purchasing power with respect to other goods. — Niall Ferguson

I love the feel of a book. I love the touch and smell and sound of the pages. I love the handling. A book is a sensual thing. You sit in a chair with it or like me you take it to bed and it's, well, enveloping. Weird I am, I know(...)You either get it or you don't. — Niall Williams

Doing nothing at all is often the very wisest thing ... as the world is a ball and is turning and everything is in fact in motion all the time, doing nothing is not really doing nothing, it's allowing things to mover at their own pace — Niall Williams

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

The parts of our lives when we write them down seem to belong in different books, by different writers even. What all these bits and pieces make up I don't know. There is no plot. Perhaps meaning is something we invent afterward, putting it all together, like imagined God. — Niall Williams

Japan. So successful was the Japanese 'welfare superpower' that by the 1970s life expectancy in Japan had become the longest in the world. But that, combined with a falling birth rate, has produced the world's oldest society, with more than 21 per cent of the population already over the age of 65. — Niall Ferguson