Quotes from Margaret MacMillan

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

British would use every means from persuasion to bribery in Morocco and when those failed the wives of British diplomats knew what they had to do to further Britain's interests.

For the sultan Wilhelm II had brought the latest German rifle, but when he tried to present it Abdul Hamid at first shrank away in terror thinking he was about to be assassinated. The heir to Suleiman the Magnificent who had made Europe tremble nearly four centuries earlier was a miserable despot so fearful of plots that he kept a eunuch near him whose sole duty was to take the first puff on each of his cigarettes.

Perhaps it was no accident that it was a Viennese, Sigmund Freud, who was to come up with the notion of the narcissism of small differences. As he wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents, 'it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other

The contempt for what the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus called Bürokretinismus served further to undermine public confidence in their government.

The Italian Futurist artist Giacomo Balla later called his daughters Luce and Elettricità in memory of what he saw at the Paris Exposition. (A third daughter was Elica—Propellor—after the modern machinery he also admired.)

Thucydides said, "The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

As the Prussian Minister of War, General Erich von Falkenhayn, said on August 4 as the war became a general one: "Even if we will perish, it was nice."10

La moda, la comida, la diversión, los viajes, todo se regulaba en aras del esfuerzo de guerra.

Atenas también necesitaban remeros, lo cual significaba que los hombres libres que no poseían mucho más que su fuerza podían obtener la ciudadanía empuñando el remo.

Junker children, girls as well, were brought up to be tough and bear pain uncomplainingly.

La guerra no es una aberración, algo que es mejor olvidar lo antes posible.

China. The Kaiser had temporarily

En 1903, el respetable funcionario Erskine Childers escribió su única novela, una historia apasionante de espionaje y aventuras, en la que advertía a sus conciudadanos sobre los peligros de una invasión alemana. El enigma de las arenas fue un éxito inmediato, y aún se reedita.

La posibilidad de librar una guerra y la evolución de la sociedad humana forman parte del mismo relato.

historiadores diplomáticos e historiadores militares se quejan del poco interés que suscitan sus campos de estudio y sus trabajos.

He was probably right. Russia at the turn of the century, with all its problems, might have been too much for any ruler, but Nicholas was better fitted to be a country squire or the mayor of a small town.

Fascists have been particularly enamored of traditional gender roles. Vichy France made Mother's Day a major festival and awarded medals to good mothers. Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief, argued that "Man should be trained as a warrior and woman as recreation for the warrior," a precept he put into practice in his own life as far as the recreation was concerned.

Far more than women, men learn to fear being cowards. Being accused of behaving like a woman carries connotations of emotionalism and weakness.

Mis dos abuelos estuvieron en la Primera Guerra Mundial, como médicos; el galés con el Ejército Indio en Galípoli y en Mesopotamia, y el canadiense en el frente occidental. Mi padre y mis cuatro tíos combatieron en la Segunda Guerra Mundial.