Simon Sebag Montefiore > Quotes

“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 Montefiore

“The greatest privilege of childhood is to live totally in the present.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, One Night in Winter

“Power is always personal: any study of a Western democratic leader today reveals that, even in a transparent system with its short periods in office, personalities shape administrations. Democratic leaders often rule through trusted retainers instead of official ministers. In any court, power is as fluid as human personality.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs, 1613-1918

“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, The Romanovs, 1613-1918

“One of those who cooked for Rasputin during the Great War was a chef at Petrograd’s luxurious Astoria Hotel who went on, after the Revolution, to cook for Lenin and Stalin. He was Spiridon Putin, grandfather of President Vladimir Putin.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs: 1613-1918

“Necessity is very often the mother of romance.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography

“What's important is not who YOU love but WHO loves you.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, One Night in Winter

“Jerusalem has a way of disappointing in tormenting both conquerors and visitors. The contrast between the real and heavenly cities is so excruciating that a hundred patients a year are committed to this city's asylum, suffering from the Jerusalem Syndrome, a madness of anticipation, disappointment and delusion.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography

“The happiness of children is based on their ignorance of what their parents are really thinking”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, One Night in Winter

“Every love story is a requiem.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, One Night in Winter

“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, Jerusalem: The Biography

“it is curious that each of Russia’s Times of Troubles – 1610–13, 1917–18 and 1991 –99 – ended with a new version of the old autocracy, eased by the habits and traditions of its fallen predecessor, and justified by the urgent need to restore order, radically modernize and regain Russia’s place as a great power.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs: 1613-1918

“So much of the inexplicable about the Soviet experience—the hatred of the peasantry for example, the secrecy and paranoia, the murderous witch hunt of the Great Terror, the placing of the Party above family and life itself, the suspicion of the USSR’s own espionage that led to the success of Hitler’s 1941 surprise attack—was the result of the underground life, the konspiratsia of the Okhrana and the revolutionaries, and also the Caucasian values and style of Stalin. And not just of Stalin.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin

“Heartbreak is an agonizing disease that you're delighted to have”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, One Night in Winter

“Sex fills a few hours of our lives yet those precious minutes count for more than months and years”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, One Night in Winter

“Love was not thunderbolts but a meandering river, an accumulation of accidents, the momentum of details.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, One Night in Winter

“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, Young Stalin

“The Jews had a love-hate relationship with the Greek culture. They craved its civilization but resented its dominance. Josephus says they regarded Greeks as feckless, promiscuous, modernizing lightweights, yet many Jerusalemites were already living the fashionable lifestyle using Greek and Jewish names to show they could be both. Jewish conservatives disagreed; for them, the Greeks were simply idolaters.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography

“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.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

“An effective tsar could be harsh provided he was consistently harsh. Rulers are often killed not for brutality but for inconsistency. And tsars had to inspire trust and respect among their courtiers but sacred reverence among the peasantry, 90 per cent of their subjects, who saw them as “Little Fathers.” They were expected to be severe to their officials but benign to their peasant “children”: “the tsar is good,” peasants said, “the nobles are wicked.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs: 1613-1918

“The formation of Stalin’s character is particularly important because the nature of his rule was so personal.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin

“In the twenty-first century, the new autocracies in Russia and China have much in common with that of the tsars, run by tiny, opaque cliques, amassing vast wealth, while linked together through hierarchical client–patron relationships, all at the mercy of the whims of the ruler. In”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs: 1613-1918

“The Bible became the book of books, but it is not one document. It is a mystical library of interwoven texts by unknown authors who wrote and edited at different times with widely divergent aims. This sacred work of so many epochs and so many hands contains some facts of provable history, some stories of unprovable myth, some poetry of soaring beauty, and many passages of unintelligible, perhaps coded, perhaps simply mistranslated, mystery. Most of it is written not to recount events but to promote a higher truth—the relationship of one people and their God.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography

“Love is a question of geography.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, One Night in Winter

“Very few politicians, who have chosen a political career, can fulfill the aspirations and survive the strains of an elevated office that in a monarchy was filled so randomly. Each tsar had to be simultaneously dictator and supreme general, high priest and Little Father. They required all the qualities listed by the sociologist Max Weber: the personal gift of grace, the virtue of legality, and "the authority of the eternal yesterday.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs, 1613-1918

“The bedroom is the one place you can truly be yourself.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, One Night in Winter

“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, Jerusalem: The Biography

“For 1,000 years, Jerusalem was exclusively Jewish; for about 400 years, Christian; for 1,300 years, Islamic; and not one of the three faiths ever gained Jerusalem without the sword, the mangonel or the howitzer.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography

“The Romanovs inhabit a world of family rivalry, imperial ambition, lurid glamour, sexual excess and depraved sadism; this is a world where obscure strangers suddenly claim to be dead monarchs reborn, brides are poisoned, fathers torture their sons to death, sons kill fathers, wives murder husbands, a holy man, poisoned and shot, arises, apparently, from the dead, barbers and peasants ascend to supremacy, giants and freaks are collected, dwarfs are tossed, beheaded heads kissed, tongues torn out, flesh knouted off bodies, rectums impaled, children slaughtered; here are fashion-mad nymphomaniacal empresses, lesbian ménage à trois, and an emperor who wrote the most erotic correspondence ever written by a head of state. Yet this is also the empire built by flinty conquistadors and brilliant statesmen that conquered Siberia and Ukraine, took Berlin and Paris, and produced Pushkin, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky and Dostoevsky; a civilization of towering culture and exquisite beauty.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs, 1613-1918

“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, The Romanovs, 1613-1918