Quotes from Robert K. Massie

Why is almost the whole earth governed by monarchs?" Voltaire asked. "The honest answer is because men are rarely worthy of governing themselves.… Almost nothing great has ever been done in the world except by the genius and firmness of a single man combating the prejudices of the multitude.… I do not like government by the rabble.

Catherine approved this choice reluctantly. She recognized Peter Panin's military abilities, but she disliked him personally. He had often declared that Russia should be ruled by a man; his preference was Grand Duke Paul. Catherine also worried about his reputation as a military martinet and about his unconventional personal behavior: he sometimes appeared in his headquarters wearing a gray satin nightgown and a large French nightcap with pink ribbons.

Why Lenin triumphed, why Nicholas failed, why Alexandra placed the fate of her son, her husband and his empire in the hands of a wandering holy man, why Alexis suffered from hemophilia—these are the true riddles of this historical tale. All of them have answers except, perhaps, the last.

Early in his reign, Alexis had issued an edict sternly forbidding his subjects to dance, to play games or watch them, at wedding feasts either to sing or play on instruments, or to give one's soul to perdition in such pernicious and lawless practices as word play, farces or magic.

Most of the Streltsy were simple Russians, living by the old ways, revering both tsar and patriarch, hating innovation and opposing reforms.

They say it is a wide road that leads to war and only a narrow path that leads home again.

Voltaire rubbed salt into these wounds by denouncing war as the "great illusion." "The victorious nation never profits from the spoils of the conquered; it pays for everything," he said. "It suffers as much when its armies are successful as when they are defeated. Whoever wins, humanity loses.

A man at my age would make a poor lover," he advised a minister in London who had suggested that approach. "Alas, my scepter governs no more.

Naturally, the richer the Streltsy became, the more reluctant they were to resume their primary duties as soldiers.

In time, the expression "Potemkin village" came to mean a sham, or something fraudulent, erected or spoken to conceal an unpleasant truth. As such, it became a cliché; now, it is part of the language.

Finally, she agreed to come in the spring and summer of 1787, the year of her silver jubilee, the twenty-fifth anniversary of her accession to the throne. The planning and preparation of Catherine's Crimean journey began. It was to be the longest journey of her life and the

While Voltaire lived, Frederick of Prussia told him, "After your death, there will be no one to replace you"; when the philosopher was gone, the king said, "For my part, I am consoled by having lived in the age of Voltaire.

Voltaire had exercised the greatest intellectual influence on Catherine, and Diderot was the only one of the major philosophes she actually met, but it was in Friedrich Melchoir Grimm that the empress found a lifelong friend.

One cannot always know what children are thinking. Children are hard to understand, especially when careful training has accustomed them to obedience and experience has made them cautious in conversation with their teachers. Will you not draw from that the fine maxim that one should not scold children too much but should make them trustful, so that they will not conceal their stupidities from us?

Everyone knows the nature of colic," quipped Frederick of Prussia. "When a heavy drinker dies from colic, it teaches us to be sober," deadpanned Voltaire.

If we do not agree to reduce cruelty and moderate a situation intolerable for human beings," she said, "then they themselves will take things in hand.

All my life I have had this inclination to yield only to gentleness and reason—and to resist all pressure.

Thousands of people, either in person or in writing, told me that reading my book made a difference in their lives. Some said that it led to an interest in Russia that they now manifest at many levels of scholarship and education. A large number tell me that Nicholas and Alexandra introduced them to history in general and that they now find interest in many areas of the human past.

Later, she confessed that ego and prestige played a part; that she loved to possess, to amass. "It is not love of art," she admitted, in part facetiously. "It is voracity. I am a glutton." Her agents continued to buy everything available of beauty and value. During her reign, Catherine's collection expanded to almost four thousand paintings. She became the greatest collector and patron of art in the history of Europe.

Peter came to understand that the roots of Western technological achievement lay in the freeing of men's minds. He grasped that it had been the Renaissance and the Reformation, neither of which had ever come to Russia, which had broken the bonds of the medieval church and created an environment where independent philosophical and scientific inquiry as well as wide-ranging commercial enterprise could flourish.

his faster, more powerful battle cruisers would gobble up armored cruisers "like an armadillo let loose on an ant-hill.

Milne, Fisher raged, was a "backstairs cad," a "sneak," a "serpent of the lowest type," and "Sir Berkeley Mean who buys his Times second-hand for a penny.

Poland now was reduced to one-third its original size and a population of four million. When the treaties were signed, Catherine told herself that not only had she fended off the revolutionary virus spreading from France, but she was simply reoccupying lands that had once belonged to the great sixteenth-century principality of Kiev, "lands still inhabited by people of the Russian faith and race.

He always wore large jeweled rings on his right hand; sometimes, grasping a welcoming hand so hard that the rings bit and the owner winced, the hand shaker said merrily, "Ha ha! The mailed fist! What!