Norman Davies Quotes

In history there's what's written down and there's what actually happened.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

Learning from history is impossible if the narrative is wrong.

Creative memory is the historian's most subtle opponent.

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.

When we work with history, to a very great degree we are all guessing. But by using motifs of time and history in a fantasy setting, we are acknowledging that this educated guesswork, invention, fantasy underlie our treatment of the past and its peoples - and we are not claiming a right to do with them as we will.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

I should add that it is open to debate whether what we call the writing of history these days is truly scientific.

Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history - revisionist historians is what I like to call them.

Of course history is easily manipulated - though that makes it even more important for us to know what actually happened.

If history starts as a guest list, it has a tendency to end like the memory of a drunken party: misheard, blurred, fragmentary.

Any child knows that history can only be a reduced representation of reality, but it must be a true one, not distorted by queer lenses.

I find that the history books that we teach our kids with are not fully truthful, in my opinion.

It is like writing history with lightning and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.

There is no such thing as a final draft of history.

One duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

Oh do not read history, for that I know must be false.

What is history after all? History is facts which become lies in the end; legends are lies which become history in the end.

People bang on all the time about whether what I've done is the truth or not. Well, to me, history is just a series of elaborate fictions.

The challenge for a writer looking at history is to figure out what is history and what is myth. After all, what you are looking at is an interpretation of history, and so at some level, it becomes an interpretation of an interpretation.

A lot of what we think of as history is actually just a version of events which may or may not be true.

The voice of history is often little more than the organ of hatred or flattery.

History justifies whatever we want it to. It teaches absolutely nothing, for it contains everything and gives examples of everything.

History may never have all the facts, but history always has the last word.

Not all that is presented to us as history has really happened; and what really happened did not actually happen the way it is presented to us; moreover, what really happened is only a small part of all that happened. Everything in history remains uncertain, the largest events as well as the smallest occurrence.