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" 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. "

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

Norman Davies

Scotland

English

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

" 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

Army

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

Norman Davies

Experience

Family

" 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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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