Margaret MacMillan Quotes

The Arab who built himself a hut with marbles from the temple of Palmyra is more philosophical than all the curators of the museums of London, Paris, and Munich.

I think that America has an obsession with history, really.

You cannot not know history.

With each passing decade, history becomes less real for us, less immediate and essential to our way of life, and so, like 'green' nature, more of a commodity or an advertising gimmick.

Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.

We can't afford to deny our past in a bid to be empowered. But what we can do is contextualize the past.

Until we perceive the meaning of our past, we remain the mere carriers of ideas, like the Nomads.

There is a big push that we all are engaged in, in wanting to have the newest in innovation - and I think that's all really great. But I also feel that human beings need to be aware of, and grounded in, history.

Museums, I love museums.

We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.

But we cannot just take this historical fact for granted. We must make it live.

History must not be treated as something set off by itself.

History happens all around us.

We will pass on a document will not have exactly the same meaning it had when we received it from our fathers.

Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning.

I love historical references.

For me, I wear a suit because I need to remember what's happened before me.

I would like people to get a differentiated historical view of Germany.

While I honor the soldiers in my family, and I am a student of history, the past is the past, and I do not live in the past.

The thing to remember when you're re-recording pieces from the past is that you have to have respect for the original performances, recordings, and arrangements.

My work as a whole is about excavating and shining a light on pieces of history that not only need to be seen and heard, but that can also add to the conversation about what's going on now.

History lets you know exactly where you are today. And if you pay attention to it, it gives you a broad perspective of everyone. You can relate it to pretty much any time.

The man of culture finds the whole past relevant; the bourgeois and the barbarian find relevant only what has some pressing connection with their appetite.

Our history is a passion for me. I feel that we leave out so much information and huge gaps in the American story and it makes it hard for people to really understand that we are all intricately related as Americans. So I am attracted to historically based projects because we entertain and learn something at the same time. I just love that combination.

Handle a book as a bee does a flower, extract its sweetness but do not damage it.