Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" 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

Capitalism

Communism

Defeat

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

" 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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" There is history in condoms, there is history in lampshades, there is history in everything. "

Norman Davies

Everything

History

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" None of Europe's modern nations are genuinely native. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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.' "

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

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

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

Norman Davies

Experience

Family

" 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. "