Simon Sebag Montefiore Quotes - 9quotes.com

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I always find that the more Jewish you are, the more people respect you.
Written by Simon Sebag Montefiore
The Europeans do tend to delegitimize Israel and turn Israel into a dirty word, which is unforgivable.
Written by Simon Sebag Montefiore
I don't like sports. I'm not interested in sports. I hate sports.
Written by Simon Sebag Montefiore
I love the heat and the excitement of Israel, and I will always love Jerusalem.
Written by Simon Sebag Montefiore
As a teenager, I had a weakness for freedom fighters. When Mugabe came to London to negotiate independence, I vanished from home to stand outside his hotel. I was very disappointed that he looked like a dorky teacher.
Written by 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.
Written by 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.
Written by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Mugabe's resignation fascinates because the fall of tyrants is always a family story, decline of the father, writ large. What a strange creature he is.
Written by Simon Sebag Montefiore
My wife Santa is a fanatical skier, going to Klosters many times a year. To please her, I have for 12 years tried to ski, abseil, mountain-climb, para-scend, heli-ski, land-lauf, ice-skate, toboggan, luge, bobsleigh, yodel, gulp gluhwein, dunk bread in cheese fondue, or even walk in the mountains. I have failed at every one of these pursuits.
Written by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Every time I give an interview, I seem to offend somebody in my family, usually my mother.
Written by Simon Sebag Montefiore
One of the strange things about doing publicity is that a mistake in a newspaper profile long ago is repeated and amplified over time.
Written by Simon Sebag Montefiore
When I'm in Jerusalem, I stay at the American Colony Hotel, neutral territory: the secret peace talks of 1992/3 started there.
Written by Simon Sebag Montefiore
The memoirs of the Grand Duchess Olga are an entertaining record for anyone interested in the imperial family's home life during the last years of Russian autocracy.
Written by Simon Sebag Montefiore
I can never resist Ruritanian intrigue: I was once charged with the task of offering the Estonian throne to Prince Edward. Feeling like a Dumas Musketeer on a mission, I did so, but he turned it down.
Written by Simon Sebag Montefiore
A book's title is vital.
Written by Simon Sebag Montefiore
In Georgia, where I spend much time, the democratically elected pro-western President Mikhail Saakashvili has been beleaguered by a riotous opposition which proposes creating a constitutional monarchy under the Bagrationi dynasty, with a Spanish racing driver, Prince 'Jorge' Bagrationi, as king.
Written by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Gay weddings will be remembered as Tony Blair's greatest achievement!
Written by Simon Sebag Montefiore
If only all straight weddings could be somehow gay-ified.
Written by 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.
Written by 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.
Written by 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.
Written by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Yeltsin was admirable but flawed, noble but tainted, but in his own negligent grandeur, he undermined his own real achievements - and accelerated their ruin.
Written by 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.
Written by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Alexander II really used autocracy well to negotiate the freeing of the serfs in 1861.
Written by Simon Sebag Montefiore
To make a Frankenstein monster of a complex character like Stalin would have been too simplistic. I wanted to show who he was and, if you like, how he happened.
Written by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Real stories - whether in pure fiction or historical - have a certain indefinable power; we are endlessly curious about the past and hungry for learning that we hope will illuminate the present.
Written by Simon Sebag Montefiore
In the new Georgia, Stalin is no longer Georgian. He's a Russian emperor.
Written by Simon Sebag Montefiore
In 1918, a police chief of Jerusalem was a Montefiore.
Written by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Writing about Jerusalem was very stressful; every word counts.
Written by Simon Sebag Montefiore
I don't feel that Jewish people have a class.
Written by Simon Sebag Montefiore

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