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All Quotes by author - Norman Davies

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" History is very much bound up in family experience. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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