Top 86 Quotes & Sayings by Margaret MacMillan - Page 2

Women are so much a part of war, even if they tend to see another side of it. To say they don't understand war is ridiculous.

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

We mistake being able to get lots of information from everywhere very quickly with actually getting knowledge.

As a Canadian, I've always approached international history as an outsider, neither attacking nor defending key decisions - those were made by actors who are also major figures within national historical traditions for American and British scholars.

I'm interested in the balance between big currents in history - the economies, the ideologies, social structures, and so on - and the decisions that people have to make. At the heart of all these great decisions to go to war, there are human beings who have to say, 'Yes, let's do it,' or 'No, we won't do it.'

Individual lives remind us that there is something called a common humanity and that, over the centuries, there have been people who have lived and breathed and sometimes worried about very different things and sometimes worried about the same things we do.

There was that argument that if we had more women in positions of authority, the world would be a nicer place. And then we got Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Indira Gandhi. When women become acclimatised to war, they can become every bit as ruthless as men.

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.

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 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.

The trouble with the First World War, for example, is that people think war was inevitable, but I don't agree. If you look at the Cold War, you could argue that a war was bound to happen between the Soviet Union and its allies and the United States and its allies, but it didn't.

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

Maintaining peace can be as strenuous as winning a war.

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

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

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

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

Climate change respects no borders.

I like to think I'm a recovering historian.

If we don't take responsibility for each other, it seems to me the future is going to be even bleaker.

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

I'm not sure I'm going to say that women and men are exactly the same. I think we may have different ways of approaching things, different sensitivities, and women are often better than men at picking up emotional cues.

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.

Passionate and forcefully argued, Tar Sands is a wake-up call not just to Canadians but to the wider world to take a serious look at what is happening in northern Alberta. To call this book a polemic is a compliment.

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.

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