Margaret Macmillan Quotes
History belongs to everyone. I don't think you have to give up scholarly standards. But I also don't think you want to write something that is impenetrable. You try as hard as you can to be readable.
Margaret Macmillan
Canadian historian
Modernism was born in part out of the need to find fresh ways of expression, to describe a new world that was unlike anything that had gone before.
Margaret Macmillan
Canadian historian
As history reminds us again and again, wars are not always made on the basis of rational calculations: often the contrary.
Margaret Macmillan
Canadian historian
Women are interested in relationships and how other societies manage those relationships. They may have been constrained in what roles were open to them, but they could question and observe, and they could write it down.
Margaret Macmillan
Canadian historian
I tend to think history is more a branch of literature than science.
Margaret Macmillan
Canadian historian
By the start of August 1914, it was dawning on the British that a major war was about to break out on mainland Europe. Public opinion and, crucially, the cabinet was deeply divided on whether to intervene or stay out.
Margaret Macmillan
Canadian historian
Our interest in history always reflects our own times.
Margaret Macmillan
Canadian historian
I first read the 'Raj Quartet' in the early 1970s, when Paul Scott's decision to set his novels in the dying days of the British Raj in India seemed an eccentric choice, almost as though he did not want readers. The British were tired of their imperial past.
Margaret Macmillan
Canadian historian
In my view, Germany could and should have made reparations for its aggression in World War I - but was the risk of renewed war worth forcing it to do so?
Margaret Macmillan
Canadian historian
Managing the relationship with a giant neighbour has been central to our foreign policy for more than a century. Trade and investment, as well as people, have flowed back and forth across the border, and the U.S. is, by far, our biggest trading partner.
Margaret Macmillan
Canadian historian
Theodore Roosevelt's policy to build a two-ocean navy confirmed that the old-style isolationism of the founders had not survived the modern, increasingly globalized world.
Margaret Macmillan
Canadian historian
The range of weapons at the disposal of military powers is terrifying in its capacity to damage the world and its inhabitants, perhaps even to bring humanity's long story to its end.
Margaret Macmillan
Canadian historian
The only person, if you're a religious person, who's always right is God. And if you make the mistake of thinking that you, like God, are always right, and that you, like God, always know everything, then it seems to me you're riding for a fall.
Margaret Macmillan
Canadian historian
The Canadian government has had a field day apologising for past policies towards a series of ethnic groups: Italian, Ukrainian, Sikh, Chinese, Japanese and Jews.
Margaret Macmillan
Canadian historian
Are artists the canaries in the mine, warning of the coming explosion before anyone else? It's hard to look at the world before 1914 and not wonder if they somehow felt a catastrophe was bearing down on them and their societies.
Margaret Macmillan
Canadian historian
How can even the best novelist or playwright invent someone like Augustus Caesar or Catherine the Great, Galileo or Florence Nightingale? How can screenwriters create better action stories or human dramas than exist, thousand upon thousand, throughout the many centuries of recorded history?
Margaret Macmillan
Canadian historian
American diplomats worked closely with the League of Nations. The United States used its considerable influence to settle some of the outstanding issues left over from World War I, and Washington took the lead in negotiating naval limitations in the Pacific.
Margaret Macmillan
Canadian historian
Poor little Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, or whatever her name is. It must be incredible at that age to be surrounded by people telling you you're wonderful.
Margaret Macmillan
Canadian historian
How curious that such an outsize man, in physique as well as personality, should be remembered today mainly for giving his name to a small fish. For the 19th century, Bismarck was no herring but a leviathan. Between 1862 and 1890, he created Germany, seeing off first the Austrian empire and then France.
Margaret Macmillan
Canadian historian
Exercising power can do strange things to people. You can become convinced that you're irreplaceable. You can become convinced that you're always right. And I think the danger is the longer you stay in power, the more likely that is to happen.
Margaret Macmillan
Canadian historian
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