Margaret MacMillan Quotes

I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passe abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.

We must understand the motives and forces of our time and analyze their structure from three points of view: the material, the functional, and the spiritual. We must make clear in what respects our epoch differs from others and in what respects it is similar.

To a person growing up in the power of demography, it was clear that history had to do not with the powerful actions of certain men but with the processes of choice and preference.

There are times in history where a particular doctrine becomes a symbol of a greater problem.

Economics, politics, and personalities are often inseparable.

The way I work: I pick a country. I learn the political history - I mean I really learn it; I read until it sinks in. Once I read the political history, I can project and find the clandestine history. And then I people it with the characters.

It is natural to try to understand one's own time and to seek to analyse the forces that move it.

History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends.

Power has to do with whatever decisions men make about the arrangements under which they live and about the events which make up the history of their times.

The premise for me has always been that it's vulnerable people who do violent things. And the more vulnerable they feel, often, the more violent they are. But I think, you know, that's an idea that comes from history, from classical theater, for me.

The enduring lesson is war is a disaster. Whoever wins, tremendous loss of life, property - a set back for civilisation.

When it comes to matters of war and peace, we must not act rashly.

Mine is, after all, the generation that had come to maturity drinking in the forebodings of the Silones, Koestlers, and Richard Wrights. It had left us ill-prepared for decisions that had to be made in our own time about Algeria, Birmingham, or the Bay of Pigs.

We need an adult in the White House. When making life-or-death, war-or-peace decisions, a president can't just pop off or lash out irrationally.

What will eventually cause the defeat of ISIL is that it will collapse under its own contradictions, frankly. When the populations in which it tries to maneuver realize that that ideology is not to their future benefit.

We will continue to work around the world to beat ISIS about where they may exist, these are horrible ideologies or murderous ideologies.

American intelligence and military agencies have a huge footprint in terms of how the world works, but they're largely invisible. I'm interested in exploring those 'geographies' of secrecy from many different angles: political, legal, economic, spatial, etc., because I am fundamentally just interested in how the world works and how societies work.

You can't win a battle against an idea with bombs, with guns, or militarily.

Life is politics.

You cannot negotiate with organizations that are based on an ideology whose core is to destroy the West and America.

I started off life at Pixar with interesting technical problems. But as time has moved on, I found that the social and management problem was far more complex and interesting.

Science, engineering, and technology discovers and invents new ways of doing things - but it doesn't dictate how we should do them.

Politicians have been downplaying the importance of history as a subject in our schools but, if they had bothered to have a better grasp of history themselves, they might have avoided costly wars. Instead they act like children. The only time that they think matters is their own.

It could be said that all armed conflicts are a ludicrous and shameful waste of lives, but World War I has a special place in the history of futility - a war without clear purpose, a war whose resolution would ultimately make the world a far worse place.

Any historian worth their salt should be aware of wars, conflicts, catastrophes. They happen. This is part of the panorama.