Best quotes by Margaret MacMillan on History

Checkout quotes by Margaret MacMillan on History

• ‟ 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
  

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

  - Margaret MacMillan
  

• ‟ 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.'

  - Margaret MacMillan
  

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

  - Margaret MacMillan
  

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

  - Margaret MacMillan
  

• ‟ How can even the best novelist or playwright invent someone like Augustus Caesar or Catherine the Great, Galileo or Florence Nightingale? How can screenwriters create better action stories or human dramas than exist, thousand upon thousand, throughout the many centuries of recorded history?

  - Margaret MacMillan
  

• ‟ The passion for the past is clearly about more than market forces or government policies. History responds to a variety of needs, from greater understanding of ourselves and our world to answers about what to do.

  - Margaret MacMillan
  

• ‟ Our interest in history always reflects our own times.

  - Margaret MacMillan
  

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

  - Margaret MacMillan
  

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

  - Margaret MacMillan
  

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

  - Margaret MacMillan
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Margaret MacMillan
  

• ‟ History matters.

  - Margaret MacMillan