Norman Davies Quotes

History is written by the rich so the poor get blamed for everything.

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.

The most powerful forces in economics are not numbers or facts. They are prejudices and preferences. No amount of evidence will ever change the degree to which many of the rich and powerful prefer themselves to be richer and more powerful and others poorer and weaker.

There are certain things that they say you can't do, there are all these secret people behind the scenes who make things available for you to do. That's why you have so much crime and violence.

If you write nonfiction, a historical account of what really happened, first of all, it's always white men who do that, and you don't have the voices that are really interesting to me, of the people who are not sheltered by the big umbrella of the establishment.

I think a reason that a lot of people feel politically paralysed is that it used to be clear how power was organised. But those who have their hands on the levers of popular culture today have great power - and it isn't even clear who they are.

America is a fundamentally good country. We have good people with good values who want to do the right thing. But the structures of power that exist are working to their own ends to extend their capability at the expense of the freedom of all publics.

The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors.

I am interested in people living in the margins of society, and I do have a mission to tell the stories of women of colour in particular. I feel we've been present throughout history, but our voices have been neglected.

The inherited tradition is that we don't tell stories about slavery from the perspective of the slave. It's told through the president or the lawyer.

The real violence is committed in the writing of history, the records of the legal system, the reporting of news, through the manipulation of social contracts, and the control of information.

Ideology has shaped the very sofa on which I sit.

As an African-American, as a woman, I think that I've been sensitized to the way in which history privileges the white male and the way in which certain aspects of history, the things that we are taught in school, the things that are handed down, never, never entered the picture though they might have been very important.

The world is run by monsters and you have to deal with them. Some of them run countries, some of them run banks, some of them run news corporations.

History is the polemics of the victor..

Philosophers are men hired by the well-to-do to prove that everything is all right.

We Blacks have never had a President; we’ve only had preachers.

The historical method is often deemed conservative, because it traces the gradual and stately growth of our venerable institutions; but it may exercise a precisely opposite influence by showing the gross injustice which was blindly perpetrated during this growth. The historical method is supposed to prove that economic changes have been the inevitable outcome of natural laws. It just as often proves them to have been brought about by the self-seeking action of dominant classes.

When you go back and look at the history of anything, it’s always the records of the elite that survive.

In 12 years of public school I can never remember any of my teachers describing slavery for what it was.

We were not born critical of existing society. There was a moment in our lives (or a month, or a year) when certain facts appeared before us, startled us, and then caused us to question beliefs that were strongly fixed in our consciousness-embedded there by years of family prejudices, orthodox schooling, imbibing of newspapers, radio, and television.

God always suspiciously looks like the people of the ruling class. Jesus is depicted as male and blond. My goodness, right in the middle of the Middle East.

After thirty years of a collapsing middle class,” he writes, “after thirty years of an economy designed to stack the deck in favor of the big guys; after thirty years of a political and constitutional system increasingly rigged to work for economic elites — after all this, the people revolted.

When '12 Years a Slave' got that much attention, everyone started to copy that. That story has to be told, but there are a lot more stories to be told than slavery.

James Brown's life was really a metaphor for our inability to talk about matters like race and class in America.