Norman Davies Quotes

We cannot build a viable state with a country that is disintegrating into small pieces.

History shows us that other highly developed forms of civilization have collapsed. Who knows whether the same fate does not await our own?

Saddam spent 35 years stealing and wasting money, and all of these systems are very fragile and brittle, and you try to fix one thing and something else gets in trouble.

It's always in the second administration when things start to go sour. They circle the wagons.

ON the decline of the Roman power, about five centuries after Christ, the countries of Northern Europe were left almost destitute of a national government.

Tunisia, which is dear to all of us, is going through difficult circumstances, exceptional circumstances, that necessitate exceptional measures to face them and prevent a worse situation Our security forces are in a full alert status, but we do have weaknesses as our prime minister admitted. We are not blaming anyone, but we are calling for everyone to feel and act responsibly. If such incidents happen again, the state will collapse. It is the duty of the president to take a stance.

Here are two ways by which every kind of government is destroyed; either by some accident that happens from without, or some evil that arises within itself. What the first will be is not always easy to foresee: but the latter is certain and determinate

The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded.

Every other country where there's absolute chaos now, what is it? They're pluralistic without consensus. Look at almost every single country, from Syria, to Iraq, to Iran, Ukraine, no matter where it is. I just think it is totally counter to our tradition.

Fundamentalism is not bred in poverty. There are plenty of poor countries in the world that don't have violence because amid the poverty there is a kind of justice and in some countries a democracy.

There's this Indian fellow who worked out a cycle like the idea of stone-age, bronze-age, only he did it on an Indian one. The cycle goes from nothing until now and 20th century and then on and right around the cycle until the people are really grooving and then just sinks back into ignorance until it gets back into the beginning again. So the 20th century is a fraction of that cycle, and how many of those cycles has it done yet? It's done as many as you think and all these times it's been through exactly the same things, and it'll be this again.

The political disfunction that has brought about the shutdown and now threatens default, isn't so much gridlock. It is exposing the fatal flaw in our Constitution and highly distinct system of government. In other words, it's the Constitution's fault. Something truly catastrophic was bound to happen sooner or later.

Dictatorships sometimes fall unexpectedly and quickly. And [Vladimir] Putin knows that for him, the loss of power doesn't mean a comfortable retirement, but something completely different.

We are no longer dealing with historical events, but with places of collapse.

"History repeats itself" and "History never repeats itself" are about equally true ... We never know enough about the infinitely complex circumstances of any past event to prophesy the future by analogy.

Women still live longer than men because their lives are easier.

The United States has collapsed economically, socially, politically, legally, constitutionally, and environmentally.

In Burma, under the present Constitution, the Army can always take over all parts of government if they think this is necessary. so until the Army comes out clearly and consistently in support of the democratic process we cannot say that it's irreversible. But I don't think we need fear a reversal too much either.

Not only did you have people fleeing Libya, people fleeing Syria, the destabilisation of other African countries as a result of arms flows, but the Libyan state itself err was no longer able to control the movement of people through it.

After a regime is removed, however, it is dangerous to leave a security vacuum.

We're facing a crisis that we have not provoked, yet we are the main victims of the greatest crisis since the 1930s. It's not been generated by factors external to the system, but by factors that are of the very essence of the system: exacerbated individualism, deregulation, competition, and so on.

We see nation-states collapsing all around us: Libya, Syria, Iraq. We do not want another failed state in our neighborhood, which would rapidly turn into a stronghold for terrorists, as we have seen in Gaza. We do not want tunnels to suburbs of Tel Aviv or missiles pointed at Jerusalem.

The situation in Georgia is determined by the breakaway regions Abkhazia and South Ossetia. While we must acknowledge the reforms initiated by Mikheil Saakashvili that drastically lowered the level of corruption and authoritarian structures in the Georgian state, under the above-mentioned circumstances, the ruling elite must keep a firm grip on the country.

The revolution of ages may bring round the same calamities; but ages may revolve without producing a Tacitus to describe them.

I hear a lot of talk about civil war. I'm concerned about that, of course. And I've talked to a lot of people about it. And what I've found from my talks are that the Iraqis want a unified country and that the Iraqi leadership is determined to thwart the efforts of the extremists and the radicals.