An apology offered and, equally important, received is a step towards reconciliation and, sometimes, recompense. Without that process, hurts can rankle and fester and erupt into their own hatreds and wrongdoings.
Margaret MacmillanRead
If you read about millions of people doing this and millions of people doing that, history seems remote and inaccessible.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the disconnect individuals may feel when viewing history as a collection of distant events rather than relatable experiences.
Margaret Macmillan's quote highlights how the vastness of history, filled with accounts of millions of people, can create a perception of it being remote and hard to connect with. It suggests that history is not just a series of events but a shared human experience that is accessible and relevant to our lives, encouraging us to find personal connections within historical narratives.
Themes
HistoryConnectionRelevanceHuman Experience
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture about the importance of studying history and its relevance to today's world.
More from Margaret Macmillan
All quotes βClimate change respects no borders.
Margaret MacmillanRead
War is a crucial, deeply ingrained part of human history. It has to be understood.
Margaret MacmillanRead
There was that argument that if we had more women in positions of authority, the world would be a nicer place. And then we got Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Indira Gandhi. When women become acclimatised to war, they can become every bit as ruthless as men.
Margaret MacmillanRead
Theodore Roosevelt's policy to build a two-ocean navy confirmed that the old-style isolationism of the founders had not survived the modern, increasingly globalized world.
Margaret MacmillanRead
If we don't take responsibility for each other, it seems to me the future is going to be even bleaker.
Margaret MacmillanRead
Similar quotes
I think when you see so many Hindu temples of the 10th century or earlier disfigured, defaced, you realise that something terrible happened. I feel the civilisation of that closed world was mortally wounded by those invasions the old world is destroyed. That has to be understood. Ancient Hindu India was destroyed.
V. S. NaipaulRead
This wicked man Hitler, the repository and embodiment of many forms of soul-destroying hatred. this monstrous product of former wrongs and shame.
Winston ChurchillRead
In Brazil, the history of the interaction between blancos and indios - whites and Indians - often reads like an extended epitaph. Tribes were wiped out by disease and massacres; languages and songs were obliterated.
David GrannRead
In the Middle Ages, cathendrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.
Umberto EcoRead
History will tell you that borders are not inevitable, they hardly existed at the end of the 19th century.
Rutger BregmanRead
Apart from the intrinsic interest of the complex system of beliefs the Puritans carried with them, their lives give a clue to what it meant at the beginning to be American. And the level of scholarship dealing with them has reached a point where it can address the human condition itself.
Edmund MorganRead