Simon Sebag Montefiore Zitate – Sprüche auf Englisch mit Übersetzung

Zitat des Tages von Simon Sebag Montefiore:

If only all straight weddings could be somehow gay-ified.

Every Russian emperor from Peter the Great to Stalin and Putin knows a leader and his security agencies must never be parted. His safety depends on their slavish devotion.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

Mr. Putin presents himself as a czar - and like any czar, he fears revolution above all else.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Most history books are about power.

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 don't feel that Jewish people have a class.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Writing about Jerusalem was very stressful; every word counts.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

As a youth, I was much more of a Zionist. But Israel was very different then. Israel's changed, and so have I.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Moses Montefiore loved Jerusalem, lived for Jerusalem, and even made it our family motto. A Zionist before the word was invented, he believed in the sacred idea of Jewish return as a religious Jew's duty, and in Jewish statehood.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

I don't like sports. I'm not interested in sports. I hate sports.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Writing about Jerusalem can be such a minefield.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

I was taught Shakespeare brilliantly by an eccentric genius at Harrow named Jeremy Lemmon who made me want to be a writer.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

There is a view of Russian exceptionalism, that they are a unique civilisation, a view right since Ivan the Terrible that Russia is a special civilisation with a special culture. Putin is pushing that now.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Stalin had 15 scenic seaside villas, some of them czarist palaces, on the Black Sea coast of Abkhazia. In 2002, I visited and photographed these extraordinarily well-preserved Stalinist time capsules.

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

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

There are few words in Russian for the Western concept of 'law,' but there are legions of words for connections, helping people from one's neck of the woods.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

It is a characteristic of potentates that they don't succumb to peaceful retirement. Instead, they hold power in their hoary fists as judgment and grip weaken, destroying any successors except family members.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Saddam Hussein admired, studied, and copied Stalin, the paragon of modern dictators.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Historical fiction is simply fiction set in the past, and should be judged as such.

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

Russian writers enjoy almost sacred status.

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

The Soviet Union was designed for Muscovite rule, not for division into independent republics. Yet the latter is exactly what happened in 1991 - and the Kremlin has never accepted it.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

When I'm up, I'm over-exuberant; when I'm down, I just wander round on my own. I have no middle space.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

All tyrannies are virtuoso displays, over many years, of cunning, risk-taking, terror, delusion, narcissism, showmanship, and charm, distilled into a spectacle of total personal control.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Putin regards Stalin as a great tsar; he is a great tsar. Asked who the worst tsars were, he said Nicholas II and Gorbachev.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

A revolution resembles the death of a fading star, an exhilarating Technicolor explosion that gives way not to an ordered new galaxy but to a nebula, a formless cloud of shifting energy.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

We have far too many Tudors. Henry VIII is far too over-rated. He's become the ultimate brand name, like the Marks & Spencers of a high street of British history. I'm more interested in King Herod.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

Simon Sebag Montefiore

The Russian Revolution mobilized a popular passion across the world based on Marxism-Leninism, fueled by messianic zeal. It was, perhaps, after the three Abrahamic religions, the greatest millenarian rapture of human history.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

If only all straight weddings could be somehow gay-ified.

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

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

Under Stalin, artists weren't dissidents; all they hoped was to survive and write.

Simon Sebag Montefiore