Top 40 Norman Davies Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Norman Davies Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

I find myself sick to death, tired of arguing about det

I find myself sick to death, tired of arguing about details with people who don’t know basic facts.
Norman Davies
None of Europe’s modern nations are genuinely native.
Norman Davies
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.
Norman Davies
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
Capacity of human societies both to absorb and to discard cultures is much underestimated.
Norman Davies
Each side tries to legitimize their aims by appealing to history, sometimes selectively choosing episodes and other times just by inventing history.
Norman Davies
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.
Norman Davies
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.’
Norman Davies
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
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
A bad historian is even more dangerous than dead documentary wood.
Norman Davies
The idea that historians write the definitive version of something that will last for all time is less current than it used to be.
Norman Davies
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.
Norman Davies
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
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.
Norman Davies
It is important to remember that John Paul II was not an American or a Frenchman.
Norman Davies
I do belong to the club which doesn’t see a distinction between academic history and popular history.
Norman Davies
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
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
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.
Norman Davies
Only by painting the great panorama of history, can the great history-reading public be entertained or satisfied.
Norman Davies
The most noticeable thing about the Soviet collapse was that it followed a natural course.
Norman Davies
Transience is one of the fundamental characteristics both of the human condition and of the political order.
Norman Davies
All political institutions will end sooner or later. The question is when and how.
Norman Davies
The Euro Sceptics are the English National Party in disguise, and they have poor old David Cameron over a barrel.
Norman Davies
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
Nearly all interested parties think I write too shortly on the subjects that interest them most.
Norman Davies
Bulgaria was the only Axis country to deflect insistent German demands for the deportation of its Jews.
Norman Davies
History is very much bound up in family experience.
Norman Davies
Any historian worth their salt should be aware of wars, conflicts, catastrophes. They happen. This is part of the panorama.
Norman Davies
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
Nothing stands still. Everything is moving in some dire

Nothing stands still. Everything is moving in some direction or another.
Norman Davies
Poland was the racial laboratory of the Nazis. This is where they started to put their abhorrent theories into practice.
Norman Davies
Our mental maps are distorted by who are the ‘winners’ of history and who are the powers of today.
Norman Davies
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.
Norman Davies
One might have thought that 70 years was time enough to work out what really happened in 1939. It isn’t the case. Misunderstandings and misinformation abound.
Norman Davies
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
The shores of the Black Sea lend themselves to the literary genre that may be classified as ‘cultural pilgrimage,’ which is not just a higher form of travel writing but which has the further mission of reporting on present conditions and supplying neglected knowledge.
Norman Davies
Every austerity measure that Cameron and George Osborne make is being presented in Scotland as the English starving us.
Norman Davies
Winners of wars get a standing start in the post-war stakes of remembrance.
Norman Davies