Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" Writing about Jerusalem can be such a minefield. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Related Quotes:

" With popular rulers, the wife can become the guardian of their greatness: Peter the Great was succeeded by his wife, Catherine I. Sometimes the wives are an improvement. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" I'm not disciplined at all. I barely function. But I get a lot done. I take days off all the time, but when I work, I work very fast and very efficiently. But I'm always having days when I'm feeling a little anxious, and I take a day off. I work in a funny way. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" While most know the young Stalin was a seminarian, few realize that he was also a Georgian patriot, a published romantic poet. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" The political lives of tyrants play out human affairs with a special intensity: the death of a democratic leader long after his retirement is a private matter, but the death of a tyrant is always a political act that reflects the character of his power. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" I am ashamed to say that both my children knew Stalin before they knew Thomas the Tank Engine. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" When I was young, I always wanted to go to Russia. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" President Yeltsin's instincts were decent: he encouraged the marketplace, the press flourished, and everything started to open - even the KGB archives. Yeltsin reburied Nicholas II. Free from Soviet anti-semitism, he surrounded himself with Jewish capitalists and advisers who returned to public life for the first time since the 1920s. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" Alexander II really used autocracy well to negotiate the freeing of the serfs in 1861. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" In the new Georgia, Stalin is no longer Georgian. He's a Russian emperor. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" I always find that the more Jewish you are, the more people respect you. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" Nicholas I has been called 'Genghis Khan with a telegraph.' Stalin was 'Genghis Khan with a telephone.' But Mr. Putin is not Genghis Khan with a BlackBerry. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" Around us, we do see attempts to delegitimize Israel, a sort of secret, hidden anti-Semitism growing in many countries, often on the right but also on the left. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" Believe it or not, some Western analysts in the 1930s insisted that Stalin was a 'moderate,' controlled by extremists like the secret police chief Nikolai Yezhov. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" It's the mix of the trivial and the great events that make up history. It's the low things about high people that make it fascinating, and that's why it would be a shame to exclude the trivial things. That mixing up is not just at the heart of history. It's at the heart of how to live a great life. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" The unspoken contract between ruler and subject is that in return for safety, prosperity, and prestige, the Russians entrust power and cede democratic freedoms to their leaders. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" The vanishing of David Tang is like the unthinkable diappearance of a magnificent palace on a mythical mountaintop. He was a dreammaker, pianist, adventurer, writer, entrepreneur, scholar, connoisseur, and a great friend. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" I was driving across Georgia with a warlord and his bodyguards riding shotgun with their Kalashnikovs in a convoy of Mercedes and Land Rovers. The guy put on Pink Floyd's 'Dark Side of the Moon' on a cassette, which they played on loudspeakers as we raced across the mountains, and I remember thinking, 'This sure beats respectable life in England.' "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" The tsar of War and Peace, especially in the BBC version, is a complete popinjay and a useless character. The real tsar, Alexander I, had an amazing career. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" Colonel Qaddafi's tyranny was absolutist, monarchical, and personal. The problem with such dictatorships is that as long as the tyrant lives, he reigns and terrorizes. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" I'm the sort of person who, if I arrive in a city under siege, in the middle of nowhere, I'll always find my way to the leader of the rebels. I just don't know how. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" No one can take away the experience of Yeltsin's freedoms, but Russian democracy will never follow Western models: other authoritarian 'controlled democracies' - Turkey, Taiwan, Mexico - ultimately developed into democracies. But it took decades. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" I love the flamboyance, the melodrama, the bloody theatre of Russian history. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" I much prefer writing fiction. History books, for me, are very hard work, very serious. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" It was always presumptuous to expect Russia, an ancient nation-state and proud empire of distinct culture with a tradition of autocracy, to become an Anglo-American democracy overnight - just as it is naive to expect it in other parts of the world. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" I'm the last person who would end up doing something that needs meticulous compilation of facts. It's totally against my character. I live by impulse. I'm totally ill-suited to writing history books. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" I always wanted to write a history of Jerusalem. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" The West is pathetically naive about Russian reformers. We long to believe they are real liberals, but no liberal will ever rule Russia. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" I am a passionate nonfinisher. Life is too short, and there are too many great books to read, so if I lose interest or respect, I switch. But when, of course, when you really fall in love with a book, all the others are ignored. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" In 1942, the Germans were running out of fuel. They were advancing so fast across the grasslands, the hot grasslands of south Russia, and the Russians were running out of tanks. And so both of them turned to cavalry, and there were great cavalry battles on the grasslands. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" Every time I give an interview, I seem to offend somebody in my family, usually my mother. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore