107 Quotes by Margaret MacMillan

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.

Even the gentle composer Richard Strauss was carried away by anti-French feeling. He told Kessler in the summer of 1912 that he would go along when war broke out. What did he think he could do, his wife asked. Perhaps, Strauss said uncertainly, he could be a nurse. “Oh, you, Richard!” snapped his wife. “You can’t stand the sight of blood!” Strauss looked embarrassed but insisted: “I would do my best. But if the French get a thrashing, I want to be there.”24.

They should have remembered that famous saying of Bismarck: “Preventive war is like committing suicide out of fear of death.

Anyone who falls into your hands falls to your sword!

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.

He told conductors how to conduct and painters how to paint. As Edward said unkindly, he was “the most brilliant failure in history.”33.

An apology offered and, equally important, received is a step towards reconciliation and, sometimes, recompense. Without that process, hurts can rankle and fester and erupt into their own hatreds and wrongdoings.

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.

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.