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" Nothing stands still. Everything is moving in some direction or another. "
Norman Davies
Moving
Everything
Direction
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" It's our vanity that makes us think that what forms part of our world today must be stable and secure. "
Norman Davies
Secure
Us
Vanity
" 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
Government
Wealth
Culture
" Myth-making is absolutely necessary to create the simplified images that people live off. "
Norman Davies
Live
Necessary
Create
" In essence, the tragedy of the Warsaw Rising resulted from a systemic breakdown of the Grand Alliance. "
Norman Davies
Essence
Alliance
Rising
" There is a real danger of the United Kingdom breaking up. There is a loss of common identity. "
Norman Davies
Danger
Identity
Kingdom
" 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
Organization
World
Second
" 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
Empire
City
End
" 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
Balance
Death
Good
" 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
Church
Last
Environment
" 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
First
Story
Army
" 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
People
Change
Culture
" All political institutions will end sooner or later. The question is when and how. "
Norman Davies
How
End
Will
" Law and Justice are the most vindictive gang in Europe. "
Norman Davies
Europe
Most
Law
" History is very much bound up in family experience. "
Norman Davies
Up
Experience
Family
" 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
World
More
Army
" So long as classical education and classical prejudices prevailed, educated Englishmen inevitably saw ancient Britain as an alien land. "
Norman Davies
Alien
Educated
Education
" 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
Anything
Life
Change
" Why are some things remembered and others forgotten? That is the theme I want to pursue about the Second World War. "
Norman Davies
Why
World
Theme
" 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
Know
History
Crisis
" Capacity of human societies both to absorb and to discard cultures is much underestimated. "
Norman Davies
Human
Much
Absorb
" None of Europe's modern nations are genuinely native. "
Norman Davies
None
Modern
Europe
" There is history in condoms, there is history in lampshades, there is history in everything. "
Norman Davies
Everything
History
" 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
World
History
Think
" 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
Circle
Reaction
Roots
" 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
Think
Remember
I Can
" 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
America
Work
Will
" 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
She
People
Ideas
" Nearly all interested parties think I write too shortly on the subjects that interest them most. "
Norman Davies
Think
Interest
Write
" 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
Hope
Diversity
Death
" Our mental maps are distorted by who are the 'winners' of history and who are the powers of today. "
Norman Davies
History
Winners
Today