The War That Ended Peace Quotes

“They should have remembered that famous saying of Bismarck: “Preventive war is like committing suicide out of fear of death.”
― Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road To 1914

“What may seem like a reasonable way of protecting oneself can look very different from the other side of the border.”
― Margaret MacMillan, The War that Ended Peace: How Europe Abandoned Peace for the First World War

“Theodore Rex. Roosevelt was driven by ambition, idealism and vanity. As his daughter famously remarked: “My father always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding, and the baby at every christening.”
― Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914

“IF YOU BELIEVE THE DOCTORS,” Salisbury once remarked, “nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe.”
― Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914

“The failure of the talks between Chamberlain and the German ambassador in London, the public and private outbursts of the Kaiser, the well-reported anti-British and pro-Boer sentiment among the German public, even the silly controversy over whether Chamberlain had insulted the Prussian army, all left their residue of mistrust and resentments in Britain as well as in Germany.”
― Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914

“His older compatriot Friedrich Nietzsche had entertained no such hopes: “For long now our entire European culture has been moving with a tormenting tension that grows greater from decade to decade, as if towards a catastrophe: restless, violent, precipitate, like a river that wants to reach its end.”23”
― Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914

“Nationalist movements often overlapped with economic and class issues: Rumanian and Ruthenian peasants, for example, challenged their Hungarian and Polish landlords.”
― Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914

“We have engrossed to ourselves, in a time when other powerful nations were paralysed by barbarism or internal war, an altogether disproportionate share of the wealth and traffic of the world. We have got all we want in territory, and our claim to be left in the unmolested enjoyment of vast and splendid possessions, mainly acquired by violence, largely maintained by force, often seems less reasonable to others than to us.”
― Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914

“Poincaré, unusually for his time and class, was a feminist and a strong supporter of animal rights, refusing, for example, to join the customary hunting parties at the presidential country estate.”
― Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914

“British would use every means from persuasion to bribery in Morocco and when those failed the wives of British diplomats knew what they had to do to further Britain’s interests.”
― Margaret MacMillan, The War that Ended Peace: How Europe Abandoned Peace for the First World War

“Part of Nietzsche’s appeal was that it was easy to read a great deal into his work, and people including socialists, vegetarians, feminists, conservatives and, later, the Nazis did. Sadly, Nietzsche was not available to explain himself; he went mad in 1889 and died in 1900, the year of the Paris Exposition.”
― Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914

“But the superiority of the British is that it is a matter of complete indifference to them if they appear to be stupid.”
― Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road To 1914

“told the Reichstag that the age of “Cabinet” wars, that is wars determined by rulers for limited ends, was over: “All we have now is people’s war, and any prudent government will hesitate to bring about a war of this nature, with all its incalculable consequences.” The great powers, he went on, will find it difficult to bring such wars to an end or admit defeat: “Gentlemen, it may be a war of seven years’ or of thirty years’ duration—and woe to him who sets Europe alight, who puts the first fuse to the powder keg!”89”
― Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914

“Even the gentle composer Richard Strauss was carried away by anti-French feeling. He told Kessler in the summer of 1912 that he would go along when war broke out. What did he think he could do, his wife asked. Perhaps, Strauss said uncertainly, he could be a nurse. “Oh, you, Richard!” snapped his wife. “You can’t stand the sight of blood!” Strauss looked embarrassed but insisted: “I would do my best. But if the French get a thrashing, I want to be there.”24”
― Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914

“Nicholas of Montenegro was not so easily swayed, however. He had bribed one of the defenders, an Albanian officer in the Ottoman army, to deliver the city to him. Essad Pasha Toptani, almost as much of a rogue as Nicholas himself, had first murdered the garrison’s commander and then set his price at £80,000 by sending out a message that he had lost a suitcase containing that amount and asking that it be returned.91 On April 23, Essad duly surrendered Scutari to the Montenegrins. In Montenegro’s capital, Cetinje, there were wild celebrations with drunken revelers firing their guns in all directions.”
― Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914

“For the sultan Wilhelm II had brought the latest German rifle, but when he tried to present it Abdul Hamid at first shrank away in terror thinking he was about to be assassinated. The heir to Suleiman the Magnificent who had made Europe tremble nearly four centuries earlier was a miserable despot so fearful of plots that he kept a eunuch near him whose sole duty was to take the first puff on each of his cigarettes.”
― Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914

“The French would do whatever it took to get Britain to commit itself. In 1909 they produced a carefully faked document, said to have been discovered when a French commercial traveler picked up the wrong bag on a train, which purported to show Germany’s invasion plans for Britain.”
― Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914

“Yet militarism was a more general phenomenon across Europe and throughout societies. In Britain small children wore sailor suits and on the Continent schoolchildren frequently wore little uniforms; secondary schools and universities had cadet corps;”
― Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914

“In Vienna, the rising politician Karl Lueger discovered that he could mobilize the lower classes by appealing to their fears of change and capitalism, their resentment of the prosperous middle classes, and their hatred of Jews, who came to stand in for the first two. He did so with such success that he became a mayor, over the opposition of Franz Joseph, in 1897 and remained, highly popular, in office until he died in 1910.”
― Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914

“The most stable country in Europe, Britain, had had centuries to build its parliament, local councils, laws, and law courts (and had weathered crises including a civil war along the way). More, British society had grown incrementally and slowly, taking generations to develop attitudes and institutions, from universities to chambers of commerce, clubs and associations, a free press, the whole complex web of civil society which sustains a workable political system.”
― Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914

“He told conductors how to conduct and painters how to paint. As Edward said unkindly, he was “the most brilliant failure in history.”33”
― Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914

“The Italian Futurist artist Giacomo Balla later called his daughters Luce and Elettricità in memory of what he saw at the Paris Exposition. (A third daughter was Elica—Propellor—after the modern machinery he also admired.)”
― Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914

“The contempt for what the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus called Bürokretinismus served further to undermine public confidence in their government.”
― Margaret MacMillan, The War that Ended Peace: How Europe Abandoned Peace for the First World War

“while civil servants were expected, for example, to work five to six hours a day, few did even that. In the Foreign Office, a new recruit said he rarely received more than three or four files a day to deal with and no one minded if he came in late and left early. In 1903 the British embassy had to wait for ten months to get an answer about the duty on Canadian whisky. ‘The dilatoriness of this country, if continued in progressive ratio, will soon rival that of Turkey,’ a British diplomat complained to London.”
― Margaret MacMillan, The War that Ended Peace: How Europe Abandoned Peace for the First World War

“Perhaps it was no accident that it was a Viennese, Sigmund Freud, who was to come up with the notion of the narcissism of small differences. As he wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents, ‘it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other”
― Margaret MacMillan, The War that Ended Peace: How Europe Abandoned Peace for the First World War

“Anyone who falls into your hands falls to your sword!”
― Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914

“The anarchist who finished his meal in a Paris café and then calmly murdered a fellow diner said merely, “I shall not be striking an innocent if I strike the first bourgeois that I meet.”
― Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914

“Many have seen this besides me: neediness, softness, a longing for people, a childlike nature ravished, these were palpable behind the athletic feats, high tension and resounding activity.”27”
― Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914

“We ask ourselves,” remarked Beyens, “with a touch of anxiety, whether the man we have just seen is really convinced of what he says, or whether he is the most striking actor that has appeared on the political stage of our day.”24”
― Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914

“Jews, something for which many conservatives never forgave him.”
― Margaret MacMillan, The War that Ended Peace: How Europe Abandoned Peace for the First World War