Margaret Macmillan Quotes

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  • Historian
  • born 1943
  • 79 quotes

Margaret Macmillan, a historian (born 1943), is quoted 79 times on QuoteForever. The subjects that come up most often are World War, Weapons, Canada and First World War.

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Climate change respects no borders.

I like to think I'm a recovering historian.

The Great War was nobody's fault - or everybody's.

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

Our interest in history always reflects our own times.

Maintaining peace can be as strenuous as winning a war.

History is about great forces, yes, but also about contingency.

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

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

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

War is a crucial, deeply ingrained part of human history. It has to be understood.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you start thinking war is inevitable, then in your own times, you don't resist it as strongly as you should.

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.

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

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

History should not be written to make the present generation feel good but to remind us that human affairs are complicated.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Poor little Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, or whatever her name is. It must be incredible at that age to be surrounded by people telling you you're wonderful.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We can learn from history, but we can also deceive ourselves when we selectively take evidence from the past to justify what we have already made up our minds to do.

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'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.

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.

Canadians see the Americans as cousins. We love the same sports: Canadians are crazy about baseball and basketball, and our beloved game of hockey is played all over the U.S.

Political orientation is unimportant in populism because it does not deal in evidence or detailed proposals for change but in the manipulation of feelings by charismatic leaders.

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.

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.

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.

Hubris is interesting, because you get people who are often very clever, very powerful, have achieved great things, and then something goes wrong - they just don't know when to stop.

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.

History belongs to everyone. I don't think you have to give up scholarly standards. But I also don't think you want to write something that is impenetrable. You try as hard as you can to be readable.

Margaret Macmillan is quoted on

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