Top 81 Quotes & Sayings by Norman Davies
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a British historian Norman Davies.
Last updated on April 14, 2025.
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.
Every austerity measure that Cameron and George Osborne make is being presented in Scotland as the English starving us.
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.
History must give the Poles the principal credit for bringing the Soviet bloc to its knees.
There is a real danger of the United Kingdom breaking up. There is a loss of common identity.
The one certainly for anyone in the path of an avalanche is this: standing still is not an option.
In the long run, Europe will certainly move toward unification. But it will be a process of push and pull, and there will be resistance.
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.
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.'
All states and nations, however great, bloom for a season and are replaced.
So long as classical education and classical prejudices prevailed, educated Englishmen inevitably saw ancient Britain as an alien land.
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.
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 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.
Any historian worth their salt should be aware of wars, conflicts, catastrophes. They happen. This is part of the panorama.
It is important to remember that John Paul II was not an American or a Frenchman.
All political institutions will end sooner or later. The question is when and how.
The idea that historians write the definitive version of something that will last for all time is less current than it used to be.
One of the few things that can be said for certain about Europe's prehistoric peoples is that they all came from somewhere else.
It's the historian's job not to ridicule the myths, but to show the difference between myth and reality.
Each side tries to legitimize their aims by appealing to history, sometimes selectively choosing episodes and other times just by inventing history.
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.
I find myself sick to death, tired of arguing about details with people who don't know basic facts.
Poland was the racial laboratory of the Nazis. This is where they started to put their abhorrent theories into practice.
Winners of wars get a standing start in the post-war stakes of remembrance.
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.
Nothing stands still. Everything is moving in some direction or another.
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.
The Russian myths of the Second World War are still intact.
None of Europe's modern nations are genuinely native.
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.
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.
It's our vanity that makes us think that what forms part of our world today must be stable and secure.
Only by painting the great panorama of history, can the great history-reading public be entertained or satisfied.
I do belong to the club which doesn't see a distinction between academic history and popular history.
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.
It was in the 20th century that national sovereignty really ruled the roost, and the E.U. was formed to cure that.
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.
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.
The 'politics of memory' policy appears to work largely by insinuation.
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.
I happen to belong to that group opinion which holds the break-up of the United Kingdom to be imminent.
The most noticeable thing about the Soviet collapse was that it followed a natural course.
Law and Justice are the most vindictive gang in Europe.
Bulgaria was the only Axis country to deflect insistent German demands for the deportation of its Jews.
The Law and Justice government does not want a bunch of foreign historians to decide what goes on in 'their' museum.
History is very much bound up in family experience.
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.
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.
A bad historian is even more dangerous than dead documentary wood.
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.
Poland is the natural bridge between East and West.
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.
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.
Myth-making is absolutely necessary to create the simplified images that people live off.
There is history in condoms, there is history in lampshades, there is history in everything.
The Euro Sceptics are the English National Party in disguise, and they have poor old David Cameron over a barrel.
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.
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