Michael Dirda Quotes

Napoleon the Third was not much. He died in England, and was buried in a country church-yard much the same as Kiltartan. But Napoleon the First was a great man; it was given out of him there never would be so great a man again.

[Writing about Napoleon Bonaparte:] That infernal creature who is the curse of the human race becomes every day more and more abominable.

[Of Napoleon BonaparteII:] His mind was a kind of extinct sulfur pit.

The Battle of Waterloo is a work of art with tension and drama with its unceasing change from hope to fear and back again, changewhich suddenly dissolves into a moment of extreme catastrophe, a model tragedy because the fate of Europe was determined within this individual fate.

Napoleon was one of the most complex personalities in history.He was ruthless, small in stature, a bully, vulnerable, unfaithful and I think he was the first person to shoot prisoners of war so that he had food for his own army. He was absolutely single-minded but he also obviously had charm. How else could a man like him have come back as he did and have the nation rise to a man!

Waterloo is a battle of the first rank won by a captain of the second

How often we recall with regret that Napoleon once shot at a magazine editor and missed him and killed a publisher. But we remember with charity that his intentions were good.

I knew Lee Harvey Oswald, and I knew Jack Kennedy. The odds against that-one person knowing all four of those men-must be astounding.

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

I just read history books. I read nothing but history books. They have so much to give; I wish I'd majored in history in college.

Whatever the poets pretend, it is plain they give immortality to none but themselves; it is Homer and Virgil we reverence and admire, not Achilles or Aeneas. With historians it is quite the contrary; our thoughts are taken up with the actions, persons, and events we read, and we little regard the authors.

France, freed from that monster, Bonaparte, must again become the most agreeable country on earth. It would be the second choice of all whose ties of family and fortune give a preference to some other one, and the first choice of all not under those ties.

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.

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

I have been always fascinated and seduced by history, which I think is very close, very close to literature.

Bonaparte's wish is Peace, nay that he is afraid of war to the last degree.

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

The lives of great men cannot be writ with any tolerable degree of elegance or exactness within a short time after their decease.

People say history is boring, and that is true because people are boring. We haven't changed since time began. We're still the same.

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.

I've always loved history and history is collage, it is a juxtaposition of the good and the bad and the strange, and how you place those sentences together changes the whole mood of a history.

History is a big word... History is not the sort of animal you can domesticate.

History gets thicker as it approaches recent times: more people, more events, and more books written about them. More evidence is preserved, often, one is tempted to say, too much. Decay and destruction have hardly begun their beneficent work.

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.