Top 50 Margaret MacMillan Quotes

Nigel Farage, the leader of the U.K. Independence Party, is a true populist; Senator Bernie Sanders, the former U.S. presidential candidate who campaigned for Hillary Clinton after losing his battle for the Democratic Party’s nomination, is not.

When I sat down to make a list of characters in history who exhibited curiosity, most were women. I thought it was sheer accident, and then I began to wonder.

The Italian futurists, the German expressionists, and the British vorticists were fascinated by speed and the ways the modern world was shattering conventions. The old ways of painting, writing, sculpting, and composing no longer seemed adequate to capture the world.

I’ve always loved reading diaries and memoirs and just getting a sense of different personalities and what made them tick as individuals.

As a child, I had loved history because it showed so many alternative worlds.

The 1898 annexation of the Hawaiian Islands merely formally recognized what had long been American domination.

The cubism of Braque or Picasso, the dissonant compositions of Schoenberg or Stravinsky, the free-flowing and often erotic choreography of Isadora Duncan and Nijinsky – these were acts of rebellion against the certainties and traditions of the old world.

We must do our best to raise the public awareness of the past in all its richness and complexity.

The word ‘populism’ was everywhere in 2016. Political leaders claiming to speak for the people have achieved significant victories in Europe, Asia, and, with the election of Donald Trump, the United States.

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.

The trouble with the First World War, for example, is that people think war was inevitable, but I don’t agree. If you look at the Cold War, you could argue that a war was bound to happen between the Soviet Union and its allies and the United States and its allies, but it didn’t.

Women throughout history have had to defy rigid conventions about what is and is not expected of them.

For many human beings, an interest in the past starts with themselves. That is, in part, a result of biology. Like other creatures, humans have a beginning and an ending, and in between lies their story.

History does not produce definitive answers for all time. It is a process.

Many in the English-speaking world came to agree with the Germans that the Treaty of Versailles, and the reparations in particular, were unjust, and that Lloyd George had capitulated to the vengeful French.

As history reminds us again and again, wars are not always made on the basis of rational calculations: often the contrary.

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.

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.

Use it, enjoy it, but always handle history with care.

Some might argue humans are hard-wired to fight. I don’t agree: we are conscious beings who have the capacity to make decisions.

Nuclear proliferation has never entirely been brought under control, and the arsenals of nuclear powers contain bombs far more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

When I first read Barbara Tuchman’s ‘The Guns of August’ in the autumn of 1963, it was as though history went from black and white to Technicolor.

If we do not, as historians, write the history of great events as well as the small stories that make up the past, others will, and they will not necessarily do it well.

It’s not going to be easy to create a world where both sides prefer peace, but we have to try.

I’ve always been interested in war, but especially its effects on society, which means bringing in the voices of women, which aren’t heard as much in the grand narratives.

Living through times of rapid change can be exhilarating, but it also can be very difficult.

Nominally left- and right-wing populists differ primarily in their choice of which ‘others’ to exclude and attack, with the former singling out big corporations and oligarchs, and the latter targeting ethnic or religious minorities.

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.

No one is always right.

The act of apology is something that most societies take very seriously indeed. It is an admission of wrong done to the victims and an acceptance of blame.

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.

I did projects on Champlain coming up the St. Lawrence River and on Henry Hudson cast adrift in the bay that now bears his name. And I read dozens of historical novels: Rosemary Sutcliff on Roman Britain and G. A. Henty on British heroes, though my all-time favourite was Ronald Welch’s ‘Knight Crusader.’

We can prevent fighting by limiting weapons or finding nonviolent ways to end disputes.

A lot of my father’s family in Canada volunteered in the First World War because they saw it as a war that was defending the mother country.

I tend to think history is more a branch of literature than science.

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.

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.

History can be helpful in making sense of the world we live in. It can also be fascinating, even fun.

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.

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.

I like to think I’m a recovering historian.

Individual lives remind us that there is something called a common humanity and that, over the centuries, there have been people who have lived and breathed and sometimes worried about very different things and sometimes worried about the same things we do.

If you read about millions of people doing this and millions of people doing that, history seems remote and inaccessible.

It took a world war, between 1914 and 1918, to draw the United States into a deeper and more sustained relationship with the wider world.

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?

I’m always wary of the lessons of the past. There’s a lot of past out there, and you can draw whatever lessons you want.

George W. Bush, judging by his repeated invocations, thinks that time will eventually prove that he was right. He is not alone in putting his faith in the future.

Maintaining peace can be as strenuous as winning a war.

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.

Our interest in history always reflects our own times.