Author Profile
Margaret MacMillan
1943 • Canadian • Historian
60
Total Quotes
Collected Meditations
Showing 60 quotesWe must do our best to raise the public awareness of the past in all its richness and complexity.— Margaret MacMillan
Canadians see the Americans as cousins. We love the same sports: Canadians are crazy about baseball and basketball, and our beloved game of hockey is played all over the U.S.— Margaret MacMillan
A large part of Canada heads for Florida, California, and Hawaii in the winter to get away from the snow.— Margaret MacMillan
Managing the relationship with a giant neighbour has been central to our foreign policy for more than a century. Trade and investment, as well as people, have flowed back and forth across the border, and the U.S. is, by far, our biggest trading partner.— Margaret MacMillan
In the 19th century, we didn't much like the loud annexationist voices south of the border or American support for Sinn Fein adventurers who thought, by seizing the Canadian colonies, they could force Britain out of Ireland.— Margaret MacMillan
I'm always wary of the lessons of the past. There's a lot of past out there, and you can draw whatever lessons you want.— Margaret MacMillan
The passion for the past is clearly about more than market forces or government policies. History responds to a variety of needs, from greater understanding of ourselves and our world to answers about what to do.— Margaret MacMillan
How can even the best novelist or playwright invent someone like Augustus Caesar or Catherine the Great, Galileo or Florence Nightingale? How can screenwriters create better action stories or human dramas than exist, thousand upon thousand, throughout the many centuries of recorded history?— 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 that Lloyd George had capitulated to the vengeful French.— Margaret MacMillan
Nominally left- and right-wing populists differ primarily in their choice of which 'others' to exclude and attack, with the former singling out big corporations and oligarchs, and the latter targeting ethnic or religious minorities.— Margaret MacMillan
Political orientation is unimportant in populism because it does not deal in evidence or detailed proposals for change but in the manipulation of feelings by charismatic leaders.— Margaret MacMillan
It's not going to be easy to create a world where both sides prefer peace, but we have to try.— Margaret MacMillan
We mistake being able to get lots of information from everywhere very quickly with actually getting knowledge.— Margaret MacMillan
If we don't take responsibility for each other, it seems to me the future is going to be even bleaker.— Margaret MacMillan