88 Quotes by Norman Davies

An ambassador’, quipped Sir Henry Wootton, ’is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.

All the nations that ever lived have left their footsteps in the sand. The traces fade with every tide, the echoes grow faint, the images are fractured, the human material is atomized and recycled. But if we know where to look, there is always a remnant, a remainder, an irreducible residue.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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