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" 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. "

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" 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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Norman Davies

Secure

Vanity

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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