Margaret MacMillan Quotes

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

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.

The passion for the past is clearly about more than market forces or government policies. History responds to a variety of needs, from greater understanding of ourselves and our world to answers about what to do.

It is true that large parts of the world have not had to endure state-to-state wars for decades. The majority of the world’s nations have also been spared the scourge of civil wars, although many have known violence from revolutionary insurrection.

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.

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.

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.

I’m not sure I’m going to say that women and men are exactly the same. I think we may have different ways of approaching things, different sensitivities, and women are often better than men at picking up emotional cues.

You shouldn’t expect people in the past to do things they couldn’t have done.

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.

I still remember with gratitude a series for children on everyday life where we learned about the games children in other times had played and the food they ate.

I wish we could see understanding the First World War as a European issue, or even a global one, and not a nationalistic one.

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

A large part of Canada heads for Florida, California, and Hawaii in the winter to get away from the snow.

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.

I think what we should do as historians is understand. And we can have our own views about how things turned out, but I think, in making judgements, we’re getting into tricky territory.

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.

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

There was that argument that if we had more women in positions of authority, the world would be a nicer place. And then we got Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Indira Gandhi. When women become acclimatised to war, they can become every bit as ruthless as men.

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

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

If we don’t take responsibility for each other, it seems to me the future is going to be even bleaker.

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.

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.

We mistake being able to get lots of information from everywhere very quickly with actually getting knowledge.

An apology offered and, equally important, received is a step towards reconciliation and, sometimes, recompense. Without that process, hurts can rankle and fester and erupt into their own hatreds and wrongdoings.

As a Canadian, I’ve always approached international history as an outsider, neither attacking nor defending key decisions – those were made by actors who are also major figures within national historical traditions for American and British scholars.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

If a bully wants to beat you up, you have the choice of running away or standing your ground. In our society, we have police forces who try to control bullies, sometimes by force.

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?

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.’

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.

Maintaining peace can be as strenuous as winning a war.

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.