The Fall of the Dynasties Quotes

“suite. He was warned that the Nation was rationing him to three wives, four concubines, four eunuchs, and fourteen servants. Other tyrants”
― Edmond Taylor, The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order: 1905-1922

“Nicholas’ feelings about the Bolsheviks were in some respects akin to those of a Daughter of the American Revolution about UNESCO; the habit of viewing with alarm eventually dulls the centers of apprehension upon which survival may depend.”
― Edmond Taylor, The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order: 1905-1922

“So far from having withered away, the autocratic principle on the eve of the great conflict was enjoying, in parts of Europe, a kind of ideological Indian summer, thanks to the ingenious sophistries of various contemporary apologists of neo-despotism”
― Edmond Taylor, The Fall Of The Dynasties: The Collapse Of The Old Order, 1905-1922 [Illustrated Edition]

“The last days of the Romanov dynasty recall one of those obsessive suicides where the victim swallows poison, slashes his wrists, and climbs over the parapet of a high bridge before blowing his brains out.”
― Edmond Taylor, The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order: 1905-1922

“The collapse of the great supranational — or at least supraparochial — authorities and the dissolution of long-accepted Imperial bonds released upon Europe a fearsome flood of conflicting national ambitions, of inflamed minority particularisms, of historic (sometimes almost prehistoric) irredentisms, of irreconcilable social aspirations and of rival political fanaticisms.”
― Edmond Taylor, The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order: 1905-1922

“war as being merely a noisy form of peace.”
― Edmond Taylor, The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order: 1905-1922

“country, wearing dark glasses, after the armistice—receiving”
― Edmond Taylor, The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order: 1905-1922