Matter Quotes by Margaret MacMillan

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

— Margaret MacMillan

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

— Margaret MacMillan

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.

— Margaret MacMillan

Individual lives remind us that there is something called a common humanity and that, over the centuries, there have been people who have lived…

— Margaret MacMillan

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

— Margaret MacMillan

“There are only two perfectly useless things in the world,” he quipped. “One is an appendix and the other is Poincaré!”

— Margaret MacMillan

“Nationalist movements often overlapped with economic and class issues: Rumanian and Ruthenian peasants, for example, challenged their Hungarian and Polish landlords.”

— Margaret MacMillan

How curious that such an outsize man, in physique as well as personality, should be remembered today mainly for giving his name to a…

— Margaret MacMillan

“Part of Nietzsche’s appeal was that it was easy to read a great deal into his work, and people including socialists, vegetarians, feminists, conservatives…

— Margaret MacMillan

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

— Margaret MacMillan

If we do not, as historians, write the history of great events as well as the small stories that make up the past, others…

— Margaret MacMillan

Many in the English-speaking world came to agree with the Germans that the Treaty of Versailles, and the reparations in particular, were unjust, and…

— Margaret MacMillan