Margaret MacMillan · 570 pages
Rating: (8.7K votes)
“The delegates to the peace conference after World War I "tried to impose a rational order on an irrational world.”
― Margaret MacMillan, quote from Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World
“The glories of the past compensated for the imperfections of the present.”
― Margaret MacMillan, quote from Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World
“In the fluid world of 1919, it was possible to dream of great change, or have nightmares about the collapse of order.”
― Margaret MacMillan, quote from Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World
“Wilson agreed reluctantly to their attempts: “I don’t much like to make a compromise with people who aren’t reasonable. They will always believe that, by persisting in their claims, they will be able to obtain more.”
― Margaret MacMillan, quote from Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World
“There are only two perfectly useless things in the world,” he quipped. “One is an appendix and the other is Poincaré!”
― Margaret MacMillan, quote from Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World
Margaret MacMillan
Born place: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
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“Mi aggrappavo al pensiero che un giorno potessi essere amata e accettata per come ero. Da qualcuno. Chiunque fosse. Ma adesso non ho alcuna possibilità, ci ha pensato Phoebe. Non solo ha deciso subito che non le piacevo, ma anche che non sarei dovuta piacere a nessuno. È potente, come te.”
― Ali Land, quote from Good Me, Bad Me
“This is not some big corporate plot to fatten up kids. This is what kids want. There are very few kids out there who will eat rice cakes and tofu.”
― Michael Moss, quote from Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us
“A single act of kindness can change a life.”
― Nalini Singh, quote from Allegiance of Honor
“Venus and Adonis is a spectacular display of Shakespeare’s signature characteristic, his astonishing capacity to be everywhere and nowhere, to assume all positions and to slip free of all constraints. The capacity depends upon a simultaneous, deeply paradoxical achievement of proximity and distance, intimacy and detachment.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, quote from Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
“So? If I die, then I die! The loss to the world won’t be great. Yes, and I’m fairly bored with myself already. I am like a man who is yawning at a ball, whose reason for not going home to bed is only that his carriage hasn’t arrived yet. But the carriage is ready . . . farewell!
I run through the memory of my past in its entirety and can’t help asking myself: Why have I lived? For what purpose was I born? . . .
There probably was one once, and I probably did have a lofty calling, because I feel a boundless strength in my soul . . .
But I didn’t divine this calling. I was carried away with the baits of passion, empty and unrewarding. I came out of their crucible as hard and cold as iron, but I had lost forever the ardor for noble aspirations, the best flower of life.
Since then, how many times have I played the role of the ax in the hands of fate! Like an instrument of execution, I fell on the head of doomed martyrs, often without malice, always without regret . . .
My love never brought anyone happiness, because I never sacrificed anything for those I loved: I loved for myself, for my personal pleasure.
I was simply satisfying a strange need of the heart, with greediness, swallowing their feelings, their joys, their suffering—and was never sated. Just as a man, tormented by hunger, goes to sleep in exhaustion and dreams of sumptuous dishes and sparkling wine before him. He devours the airy gifts of his imagination with rapture, and he feels easier. But as soon as he wakes: the dream disappears . . . and all that remains is hunger and despair redoubled!
And, maybe, I will die tomorrow! . . . And not one being on this earth will have ever understood me totally. Some thought of me as worse, some as better, than I actually am . . . Some will say “he was a good fellow,” others will say I was a swine. Both one and the other would be wrong.
Given this, does it seem worth the effort to live? And yet, you live, out of curiosity, always wanting something new . . . Amusing and vexing!”
― Mikhail Lermontov, quote from Der Held unserer Zeit: Kaukasische Lebensbilder
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