Top 37 Simon Sebag Montefiore Quotes
#1. Stalin was formed by much more than a miserable childhood, just as the USSR was formed by much more than Marxist ideology.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
#2. It seems that Russia today - dominated by, and accustomed to, autocracy and empire, and lacking strong civic institutions especially after the shattering of its society by the Bolshevik Terror - is destined to be ruled by self-promoting cliques for some time yet.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
#4. Perhaps 20 million had been killed; 28 million deported, of whom 18 million had slaved in the Gulags. Yet, after so much slaughter, they were still believers. At
Simon Sebag Montefiore
#5. The happiness of children is based on their ignorance of what their parents are really thinking
Simon Sebag Montefiore
#6. But to her, libraries were like hotels: secret villages inhabited by passing strangers from a thousand different worlds brought together just for a few hours.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
#7. When the Byzantine emperor Isaac Angelus demanded it for the Orthodox, Saladin decided that they must share it under his supervision and appointed Sheikh Ghanim al-Khazraji as Custodian of the Church, a role still performed today by his descendants, the Nusseibeh family.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
#11. Sex fills a few hours of our lives yet those precious minutes count for more than months and years
Simon Sebag Montefiore
#12. Who is fit to be elected?' asked Napoleon. 'A Caesar, an Alexander only comes along once a century, so that election must be a matter of chance.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
#15. Love was not thunderbolts but a meandering river, an accumulation of accidents, the momentum of details.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
#16. Old Molotov was asked if he dreamed about Stalin: "Not often but sometimes. The circumstances are very unusual. I'm in some sort of destroyed city and I can't find a way out. Afterwards, I meet HIM ... "1
Simon Sebag Montefiore
#17. Marx wrote that 'History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.' This was witty but far from true. History is never repeated, but it borrows, steals, echoes and commandeers the past to create a hybrid, something unique out of the ingredients of past and present.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
#18. Iraq was already in the grip of a bloody insurgency against British rule. Churchill therefore called a conference in Cairo to hand over a certain amount of power to Arab rulers under British influence.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
#19. At Peter's court, the tournament of power would be still more vicious. The prizes were glittering, the ascent vertiginous, the descent sudden and the end often lethal.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
#20. The European upper-class could not decide if the Jews were a noble race of persecuted biblical heroes, everyone a King David and Maccabee, or a sinister conspiracy of mystically brilliant, hook-nosed, hobbits with almost supernatural powers.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
#21. Young Stalin Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar Potemkin: Catherine the Great's Imperial Partner
Simon Sebag Montefiore
#22. War was simply a slaughterhouse on wheels, he thought. For most men, soldiering was tragedy expressed as a profession.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
#24. In the midst of Our great grief,' announced Alexander III, 'the voice of God bids Us to stand staunchly for government relying on God's design with faith in the truth of autocratic power.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
#25. The formation of Stalin's character is particularly important because the nature of his rule was so personal.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
#26. What the fanatical Jewish conservatives regarded as heathen pollution, cosmopolitans saw as civilization. This was the start of a new pattern in Jerusalem: the more sacred she became, the more divided.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
#27. History is little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
Edward Gibbon
Simon Sebag Montefiore
#30. Jerusalem is the house of the one God, the capital of two peoples, the temple of three religions and she is the only city to exist twice - in heaven and on earth: the peerless grace of the terrestrial is as nothing to the glories of the celestial.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
#32. Stalin was always exceptional, even from childhood. We have relied on Trotsky's unrecognizably prejudiced portrait for too long. The truth was different. Trotsky's view tells us more about his own vanity, snobbery and lack of political skills than about the early Stalin.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
#33. It was not the lover she regretted,' wrote a Swiss imperial tutor, who understood their relationship. 'It was the friend.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
#37. The murky world of terrorism is more relevant than ever today: terrorist organizations, whether Bolshevik at the beginning of the twentieth century or Jihadi at the start of the twenty-first, have much in common.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
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