Norman Davies Quotes

For people familiar with Eastern Europe, Marci Shore's 'The Taste of Ashes' is, in spite of its subject matter, delicious. A professor at Yale with much experience in Eastern Europe, she writes with great sureness of touch, weaving personal recollections with intellectual commentary and ideas with emotions, including her own.

- Norman Davies

Nowadays, it is no longer possible to maintain that the Nazi-Soviet pact of 23 August 1939 was a fiction invented by bourgeois-imperialist enemies. Everyone has seen the film clips of Herr Ribbentrop landing in Moscow, and of Stalin smiling broadly as Ribbentrop and Molotov signed up side by side.

- Norman Davies

In the years of the Red Terror that followed the Bolshevik Revolution, the voice of dissent was stifled by universal denunciations, house searches, and preventive arrests.

- Norman Davies

Northern Ireland must, in future, be absorbed into the Irish republic. Wales and Scotland must advance from devolution to full independent status. The four nations of these islands must commit themselves absolutely to the project of a United Europe.

- Norman Davies

It was in the 20th century that national sovereignty really ruled the roost, and the E.U. was formed to cure that.

- Norman Davies

Winners of wars get a standing start in the post-war stakes of remembrance.

- Norman Davies

I happen to belong to that group opinion which holds the break-up of the United Kingdom to be imminent.

- Norman Davies

Serenity is the balance between good and bad, life and death, horrors and pleasures. Life is, as it were, defined by death. If there wasn't death of things, then there wouldn't be any life to celebrate.

- Norman Davies

The idea that historians write the definitive version of something that will last for all time is less current than it used to be.

- Norman Davies

Fifty years would seem to be time enough to prepare a definitive history of the Second World War. In an age of instant data-gathering, one might think that the historians could have arrived at a consensus for interpreting the main events of the war. In reality, no such consensus exists.

- Norman Davies

I can just remember the blitz of Manchester, or perhaps my father's tales about the blitz of Manchester. I can remember the blackout, the powdered eggs, and the gas masks. But I think no British person should pretend that being resident in England could count as being in the thick of the action.

- Norman Davies

Law and Justice are the most vindictive gang in Europe.

- Norman Davies

Poland in the 1990s saw a surge of unrestrained, American-style capitalism. With millions of Poles living in the U.S.A., the defeat of communism led many to aim for a lifestyle derivative of Chicago or Detroit.

- Norman Davies

It's the historian's job not to ridicule the myths, but to show the difference between myth and reality.

- Norman Davies

Under Lenin, hardly less than under Stalin, historians harbored critical opinions at their peril. The writing, let alone the publication, of political diaries was virtually impossible.

- Norman Davies

People don't see very often their death coming... Look at the French Revolution: The king of France was thinking in the 1780s, 'We're doing rather better than my father in the 1770s.'

- Norman Davies

The Black Sea is Eastern Europe's counterpart to the Mediterranean.

- Norman Davies

The most noticeable thing about the Soviet collapse was that it followed a natural course.

- Norman Davies

The historical profession is nowhere famous for its tolerance, but there are not many countries where historians can expect to pay for their opinions with penal servitude or the firing squad.

- Norman Davies

In 1945, when the Second World War technically ends in Poland, the incoming Soviet army liberates some groups of people but begins to oppress the general population, in some ways more harshly than it had happened before.

- Norman Davies

Bulgaria was the only Axis country to deflect insistent German demands for the deportation of its Jews.

- Norman Davies

The last years of fading communism provided an ideal environment for Poland's Catholic Church, which acted as an umbrella for dissenters of all sorts.

- Norman Davies

Why does a state last a thousand years? Why not 999? Why not a thousand and one? What are the events that finally bring the whole thing down? That is what I am asking.

- Norman Davies

The E.U. is an organization that was created after the Second World War for calming down the nationalism of member states, and it did so very successfully.

- Norman Davies

I always needle a bit when people say I'm a champion of the Poles, because I've always had a very multinational view of Poland.

- Norman Davies

Each side tries to legitimize their aims by appealing to history, sometimes selectively choosing episodes and other times just by inventing history.

- Norman Davies

The shores of the Black Sea lend themselves to the literary genre that may be classified as 'cultural pilgrimage,' which is not just a higher form of travel writing but which has the further mission of reporting on present conditions and supplying neglected knowledge.

- Norman Davies

At the end of the Roman Empire, in the Byzantine period, the empire shrinks and shrinks until it consists of one city, Constantinople, and the Ottoman Turks can encircle it.

- Norman Davies

It's unimaginable to meet a Pole or a German who does not know about the history of their country. But lots of English people don't know the difference between Britain and England.

- Norman Davies

The advance of standard English culture was less assisted by government policy than by the sheer weight, wealth, and number of England's well-established cultural institutions.

- Norman Davies

All states and nations, however great, bloom for a season and are replaced.

- Norman Davies

In the 21st century, there will probably be a reflex against the disintegration of traditional European culture. What started as a reaction will come full circle, and there will be a return to the roots.

- Norman Davies

Only by painting the great panorama of history, can the great history-reading public be entertained or satisfied.

- Norman Davies

Any historian worth their salt should be aware of wars, conflicts, catastrophes. They happen. This is part of the panorama.

- Norman Davies

It's our vanity that makes us think that what forms part of our world today must be stable and secure.

- Norman Davies

Poland was the racial laboratory of the Nazis. This is where they started to put their abhorrent theories into practice.

- Norman Davies

A bad historian is even more dangerous than dead documentary wood.

- Norman Davies

The question is whether a confident Europe will be a rival for North America - or whether they will work together and become a more unified bloc.

- Norman Davies

I wanted to produce a book that would demonstrate not only the rich diversity of people who answered to Anders's command but also the extraordinary variety of their experiences and emotions: from death to despair, fear and longings and eventually to hope.

- Norman Davies

Our mental maps are distorted by who are the 'winners' of history and who are the powers of today.

- Norman Davies

Traditionally, historians thought in terms of invasions: the Celts took over the islands, then the Romans, then the Anglo-Saxons. It now seems much more likely that the resident population doesn't change as much as thought. The people stay put but are reculturalized by some new dominant culture.

- Norman Davies

The Euro Sceptics are the English National Party in disguise, and they have poor old David Cameron over a barrel.

- Norman Davies

One might have thought that 70 years was time enough to work out what really happened in 1939. It isn't the case. Misunderstandings and misinformation abound.

- Norman Davies

Every austerity measure that Cameron and George Osborne make is being presented in Scotland as the English starving us.

- Norman Davies

Myth-making is absolutely necessary to create the simplified images that people live off.

- Norman Davies

In the long run, Europe will certainly move toward unification. But it will be a process of push and pull, and there will be resistance.

- Norman Davies

Poland is the natural bridge between East and West.

- Norman Davies

Capacity of human societies both to absorb and to discard cultures is much underestimated.

- Norman Davies

Historical change is like an avalanche. The starting point is a snow-covered mountainside that looks solid. All changes take place under the surface and are rather invisible.

- Norman Davies

I do belong to the club which doesn't see a distinction between academic history and popular history.

- Norman Davies

So long as classical education and classical prejudices prevailed, educated Englishmen inevitably saw ancient Britain as an alien land.

- Norman Davies

It is important to remember that John Paul II was not an American or a Frenchman.

- Norman Davies

I first heard of General Anders and his army more than 50 years ago. I admired him then, and I admire him still; and I feel a special bond with the men, women and children whom he rescued from hunger, disease, and official abuse. Theirs is a story of endurance and fortitude that gives one faith in the human spirit.

- Norman Davies

History must give the Poles the principal credit for bringing the Soviet bloc to its knees.

- Norman Davies

Young people have to learn in a cocoon filled with false optimism. Unlike their parents and grandparents, they grow up with very little sense of the pitiless passage of time.

- Norman Davies

One of the few things that can be said for certain about Europe's prehistoric peoples is that they all came from somewhere else.

- Norman Davies

None of Europe's modern nations are genuinely native.

- Norman Davies

Europe's fragmentation puts the wider historical picture beyond reach.

- Norman Davies

Why are some things remembered and others forgotten? That is the theme I want to pursue about the Second World War.

- Norman Davies

I first came across the Anders Army story by accident. When I first went to live in Oxford in the 1960s, I discovered that some of my close neighbours had been on the Anders trail.

- Norman Davies

The one certainly for anyone in the path of an avalanche is this: standing still is not an option.

- Norman Davies

States seem to have a natural life cycle, and anything can occur to change them into something else, and that something might be no bad thing.

- Norman Davies

I find myself sick to death, tired of arguing about details with people who don't know basic facts.

- Norman Davies

One of the problems in the Ukrainian crisis is that very few Westerners know their history, or if they know it, what they learn is what we call the Russian version of history.

- Norman Davies

The Law and Justice government does not want a bunch of foreign historians to decide what goes on in 'their' museum.

- Norman Davies

Nothing stands still. Everything is moving in some direction or another.

- Norman Davies

In essence, the tragedy of the Warsaw Rising resulted from a systemic breakdown of the Grand Alliance.

- Norman Davies

The 'politics of memory' policy appears to work largely by insinuation.

- Norman Davies

Nearly all interested parties think I write too shortly on the subjects that interest them most.

- Norman Davies

There is a real danger of the United Kingdom breaking up. There is a loss of common identity.

- Norman Davies

The United Kingdom is not, and never has been, a nation state.

- Norman Davies

History is very much bound up in family experience.

- Norman Davies

Transience is one of the fundamental characteristics both of the human condition and of the political order.

- Norman Davies

I don't see why a book shouldn't be intellectually sound, entertaining, and fun to read. Historians who write academic history, which is unreadable, are basically wasting their time.

- Norman Davies

The Russian myths of the Second World War are still intact.

- Norman Davies

All political institutions will end sooner or later. The question is when and how.

- Norman Davies