107 Quotes by Margaret MacMillan

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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