Margaret MacMillan Quotes

If history is really relevant in today's world, the proposition doesn't command much respect. Perhaps the past is a different country, but if so no one much wants to travel there.

I am a part of history whether people want to take it seriously or not.

History is more or less bunk.

I do enjoy history. That's one of the things that I love about acting is you get a chance to really dive into history and develop a real personal opinion about it.

The way you 'take history' is also a way of 'making history.'

The success of 'Rome' was in making the history accessible and giving viewers everyman characters through which they can connect to historical figures. It stops the story from being too remote.

It's rare that you get to be a part of something that, hopefully, has some significance socially or historically.

The one challenge you have when you're going back into history is that people, unlike with today's news - we think we know what's happened already - we think that it's history and therefore less interesting.

I actually do think the history is so epic that it actually kind of writes itself.

I always wanted to be historical, from almost a baby on, I felt that way about it.

It is not heroes that make history, but history that makes heroes.

What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most won't even stand close to the blade. I'm one of those. We don't bend anything.

I was a terrible history student. They taught me history as if it were a visit to a wax museum or to the land of the dead. I was over twenty before I discovered that the past was neither quiet nor mute.

History, like a badly constructed concert hall, has occasional dead spots where the music can't be heard.

I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.

The lives of heroes have enriched history, and history has adorned the actions of heroes ; and thus I cannot say whether the historians are more indebted to those who provided them with such noble materials, or those great men to their historians.

History, when they do it, is ancient history, and they sensationalize even that. Contemporary history is virtually ignored on television.

Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.

History remains an open horizon that cannot be dismissed through appeals to the end of history or end of ideology.

All history must be mobilized if one would understand the present.

History isn't just what happened, but what happened to whom and why and what would have been different if the cast of characters had been different.

Today, I don't believe in destiny. But I do believe in history...There's nothing more powerful than history.

History is, in its essence, exciting; to present it as dull is, to my mind, stark and unforgivable misrepresentation.

History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.