Norman Davies Quotes

There is a strong propaganda value to history as taught in American Schools

My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and rewritten, always with various silence and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated.

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

Falsification of history, at least by the suppression of facts and of relevant but distasteful contemporary documents, is one of the most unfortunate features of modern culture.

What Does Trump See When He Looks Back In History? Mostly He Sees ... Trump

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

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

Every generation tailors history to its taste.

You know the old saying: "History is written by the winners. And also, the team of hand-picked historians that the winner keeps hidden away in an underground bunker".

One duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.

I think fiction recues history from its confusions.

Modern history is like a deaf person who is in the habit of answering questions that no one has put to them.

No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes scripture; but modern history is not a very satisfactory side-arm in political polemics; it grows less and less so.

The public history of all countries, and all ages, is bet a sort of mask, richly colored. The interior working of the machinery must be foul.

History is the most dangerous substance that the chemistry of the intellect has created…. I makes men dream, intoxicates them, breeds false memories in them, aggravates their responses, takes up their ancient grievances, torments them in their sleep, carries them into the delirium of grandeur or else of persecution, and turns nations bitter, intolerable, and vain.

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

There may be no escape from the political aspects of setting the record straight on any genocide, and the Armenian Genocide more than most other mass killings has been the victim of deliberate, sustained falsication. Historians are embedded in those politics no matter how faithfully they attend to the obligations of their craft.

Learning from history is impossible if the narrative is wrong.

Governments should encourage and facilitate the teaching of history, but one does not want them to be able to dictate, for political or partisan reasons, what kind of history and interpretations are on offer to children.

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.

Beyond institutional amnesia, a rejection of causal analysis is the existential rock on which American Exceptionalism sits. The United States unique sense of itself depends on an ambiguous relationship to the past. History is affirmed, since it is America's unprecedented historical success that justifies the exceptionalism.

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.

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.

Writing plays fast and loose with the past.