Quotes from Robert K. Massie

Gregory Rasputin, his bloodstream filled with poison, his body punctured by bullets, had died by drowning.

The German leaders, said Winston Churchill, turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia.

She (historian Barbara Tuchman) draws on skepticism, not cynicism, leaving the reader not so much outraged by human ability as amused and saddened by human folly.

For to tempt and to be tempted are things very nearly allied.

You were in a mood to quarrel. Please inform me when this inclination passes. (Catherine, in a letter to Grigory Potemkin).

With tears in her eyes, Alexandra assured him that the husband and father was infinitely more precious to her than the tsar whose throne she had shared. Nicholas finally broke. Laying his head on his wife's breast, he sobbed like a child.

This marriage had resulted from impulse: he had seen her on a high-flying swing at Tsarkoe Selo and her skirt, flared by the breeze, had exposed her ankles; he had proposed the following day.

In Russia everything is a secret, but there is no secrecy.

I have a secret conviction," he once told one of his ministers, "that I am destined for a terrible trial, that I shall not receive my reward on this earth

I used to say to myself that happiness and misery depend on ourselves. If you feel unhappy, rise above it and act so that your happiness may be independent of all outside events.

but the soldier only shook his head and said, "They say it is a wide road that leads to war and only a narrow path that leads home again.

For twenty years, Peter had been playing with soldiers; first toys, then boys, then grown men. His games had grown from drills involving a few hundred idle stable boys and falconers to 30,000 men involved in the assault and defense of the river fort of Pressburg. Now, seeking the excitement of real combat, he looked for a fortress to besiege, and Azov, isolated at the bottom of the Ukrainian steppe, suited admirably.

This," Catherine wrote later, "is the effect that can be produced by a stupid, carelessly spoken word—it is never forgotten.

We human beings often see only what is before our eyes. But God in His infinite justice searches the heart and our secret motives and manifests accordingly to us His mercy.

Peter returned to Russia determined to remold his country along Western lines. The old Muscovite state, isolated and introverted for centuries, would reach out to Europe and open itself to Europe. In a sense, the flow of effect was circular: the West affected Peter, the Tsar had a powerful impact upon Russia, and Russia, modernized and emergent, had a new and greater influence on Europe. For all three, therefore—Peter, Russia and Europe—the Great Embassy was a turning point.

But I should think our patriotism was warped and stunted indeed if it did not embrace the Greater Britain beyond the seas—the young and vigorous nations carrying everywhere a knowledge of the English tongue and English love of liberty and law. With these feelings, I refuse to speak or think of the United States as a foreign nation. They are our flesh and blood.… Our past is theirs. Their future is ours.…

Without Rasputin, there could have been no Lenin." ALEXANDER KERENSKY

is as old as man. It has come down through the centuries, misted in legend, shrouded with the dark dread of a hereditary curse. In the Egypt of the Pharaohs, a woman was forbidden to bear further children if her firstborn son bled to death from a minor wound. The ancient Talmud barred circumcision in a family if two successive male children had suffered fatal hemorrhages.

hemophilia is an inherited blood-clotting deficiency, transmitted by women according to the sex-linked recessive Mendelian pattern. Thus, while women carry the defective genes, they almost never suffer from the disease. With rare exceptions, it strikes only males. Yet it does not necessarily strike all the males in a family. Genetically as well as clinically, hemophilia is capricious.

I would say about myself that I was a true gentleman with a mind more male than female, but, together with this, I was anything but masculine and, combined with the mind and character of a man, I possessed the attractions of a loveable woman. May I be pardoned for offering this candid expression of my feelings instead of trying to cover them a veil of false modesty. This