Margaret MacMillan Quotes

In the fluid world of 1919, it was possible to dream of great change, or have nightmares about the collapse of order.

We should not be impressed when our leaders say firmly, "History teaches us" or "History will show that we were right."
They can oversimplify and force inexact comparisons just as much as any of us can. Even the clever and the powerful (and the two are not necessarily the same) go confidently off down the wrong paths. It is useful, too, to be reminded, as a citizen, that those in positions of authority do not always know better.

Told the Reichstag that the age of "Cabinet" wars, that is wars determined by rulers for limited ends, was over: "All we have now is people's war, and any prudent government will hesitate to bring about a war of this nature, with all its incalculable consequences." The great powers, he went on, will find it difficult to bring such wars to an end or admit defeat: "Gentlemen, it may be a war of seven years' or of thirty years' duration - and woe to him who sets Europe alight, who puts the first fuse to the powder keg!"89

What may seem like a reasonable way of protecting oneself can look very different from the other side of the border.

3053Geography also gave Russia a rich choice of potential enemies.

Nationalist movements often overlapped with economic and class issues: Rumanian and Ruthenian peasants, for example, challenged their Hungarian and Polish landlords.

Anyone who falls into your hands falls to your sword!

The delegates to the peace conference after World War I tried to impose a rational order on an irrational world.

China. The Kaiser had temporarily

Part of Nietzsche's appeal was that it was easy to read a great deal into his work, and people including socialists, vegetarians, feminists, conservatives and, later, the Nazis did. Sadly, Nietzsche was not available to explain himself; he went mad in 1889 and died in 1900, the year of the Paris Exposition.

History should not be written to make the present generation feel good but to remind us that human affairs are complicated.

But the superiority of the British is that it is a matter of complete indifference to them if they appear to be stupid.

Louvain was a dull place, said a guidebook in 1910, but when the time came it made a spectacular fire.

The failure of the talks between Chamberlain and the German ambassador in London, the public and private outbursts of the Kaiser, the well-reported anti-British and pro-Boer sentiment among the German public, even the silly controversy over whether Chamberlain had insulted the Prussian army, all left their residue of mistrust and resentments in Britain as well as in Germany.

In a secular world, which is what most of us in Europe and North America live in, history takes on the role of showing us good and evil, virtues and vices. Religion no longer plays as important a part as it once did in setting moral standards and transmitting values ... History with a capital H is being called in to fill the void. It restores a sense not necessarily of a divine being but of something above and beyond human beings. It is our authority: it can vindicate us and judge us, and damn those who oppose us.

Theodore Rex. Roosevelt was driven by ambition, idealism and vanity. As his daughter famously remarked: My father always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding, and the baby at every christening.

IF YOU BELIEVE THE DOCTORS," Salisbury once remarked, "nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe.

We can learn from history, but we can also deceive ourselves when we selectively take evidence from the past to justify what we have already made up our minds to do.