88 Quotes by Norman Davies

It's our vanity that makes us think that what forms part of our world today must be stable and secure.

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

All states and nations, however great, bloom for a season and are replaced.

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.'

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

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.

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.

A bad historian is even more dangerous than dead documentary wood.

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