Europe Quotes

“It is indeed the duty of historians to stress the contrast between
the standards of the past and the standards of the present. Some
fulfil that duty on purpose, others by accident.”
― Norman Davies, Europe: A History

“Reconstructing the past is rather like translating poetry. It can be done, but never exactly.”
― Norman Davies, Europe: A History

“Culture is something that must grow. You cannot build a tree; you can only plant it, and care for it, and wait for it to mature . . .”
― Norman Davies, Europe: A history from the ice age to the modern age

“Theorists of propaganda have identified five basic rules:
1. The rule of simplification: reducing all data to a simple confrontation between ‘Good and Bad’, ‘Friend and Foe’.
2. The rule of disfiguration: discrediting the opposition by crude smears and parodies.
3. The rule of transfusion: manipulating the consensus values of the target audience for one’s own ends.
4. The rule of unanimity: presenting one’s viewpoint as if it were the unanimous opinion of all right-thinking people: drawing the doubting individual into agreement by the appeal of star-performers, by social pressure, and by ‘psychological contagion’.
5. The rule of orchestration: endlessly repeating the same messages in different variations and combinations.”
― Norman Davies, Europe: A History

“Only a Christian culture could have produced a Voltaire or a Nietzsche. I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian Faith.”
― Norman Davies, Europe: A history from the ice age to the modern age

“To make his point, Ivan staged a sensational demonstration. Some time before Christmas he had arrested two Lithuanians employed in the Moscow Kremlin. He charged them with plotting to poison him. The accusations against Jan Lukhomski and Maciej the Pole did not sound very credible; but their guilt or innocence was hardly relevant. They were held in an open cage on the frozen Moskva River for all the world to see; and on the eve of the departure of Ivan’s envoy to Lithuania, they were burned alive in their cage.50 As the ice melted under the fierce heat of the fire and the heavy iron cage sank beneath the water, taking its carbonized occupants down in a great hiss of steam, one could have well imagined that something was being said about Lithuania’s political future.”
― Norman Davies, Europe: A History

“The big question about the hunter-gatherers, therefore, does not seem to be ‘How did they progress towards the higher level of an agricultural and politicised society?’ but ‘What persuaded them to abandon the secure, well-provided and psychologically liberating advantages of their primordial lifestyle?’.1”
― Norman Davies, Europe: A history from the ice age to the modern age

“Wcześniej czy później dekonstrukcjonistów zdekonstruują ich własne metody. "Przeżyliśmy Śmierć Boga i Śmierć Człowieka. Z pewnością przeżyjemy także Śmierć Historii... i Śmierć Postmodernizmu.”
― Norman Davies, Europe: A History

“The title 'Lord of All-Rus' did not possess much basis either in history or in current reality. It came into the same category as that whereby the kings of England laid claim to France. In the 1490s, two-and-a-half centuries after all traces of a united Kyivan Rus' had been destroyed, it had the same degree of credibility that the king of France might have enjoyed if, in his struggle with the German Empire, he had proclaimed himself 'Lord of all the Franks'.”
― Norman Davies, Europe: A History

“By 1939 the Gulag was the largest employer in Europe.”
― Norman Davies, Europe: A History

“An ambassador’, quipped Sir Henry Wootton, ‘is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.”
― Norman Davies, Europe: A History

“We have survived the “Death of God” and the “Death of Man”. We will surely survive “the Death of History” . . . and the death of post-modernism.”
― Norman Davies, Europe: A history from the ice age to the modern age

“Marcus Aurelius had a marvellous sense of who, and where, he was: As the Emperor Antoninus, Rome is my city and my country; but as a man, I am a citizen of the world . . . Asia and Europe are mere corners of the globe, the Great Ocean a mere drop of water, Mount Athos is a grain of sand in the universe. The present instant of time is only a point compared to eternity. All things here are diminutive, subject to change and decay; yet all things proceed from . . . the one Intelligent Cause.”
― Norman Davies, Europe: A history from the ice age to the modern age

“So long as men slaughter animals,’ the master said, ‘they won’t stop killing each other.’1 [KONOPIПTE]”
― Norman Davies, Europe: A history from the ice age to the modern age

“… Радянський Союз - це не цивілізація, що колись досягнула величі. Він завжди був навдивовижу мерзенною і брехливою державою, навіть у короткі миті свого тріумфу. Він заподіяв смерть і нещастя більшій кількості людей, ніж будь-яка інша держава світу.”
― Norman Davies, Europe: A History

“Reconstructing the past is rather like translating poetry. It can be done, but never exactly. Whether one deals with prehistoric recipes, colonial settlements, or medieval music, it needs great imagination and restraint if the twin perils of artless authenticity and clueless empathy are to be avoided.”
― Norman Davies, Europe: A History

“There are shades of barbarism in twentieth-century Europe which would once have amazed the most barbarous of barbarians. At a time when the instruments of constructive change had outstripped anything previously known, Europeans acquiesced in a string of conflicts which destroyed more human beings than all past convulsions put together.”
― Norman Davies, Europe: A History

“Contrary to some expectations. Europe's brush with modern power revived its Christian culture. The 'Railway Age' was also the age of muscular Christianity.”
― Norman Davies, Europe: A History

“For more than five hundred years the cardinal problem in defining Europe has centred on the inclusion or exclusion of Russia.”
― Norman Davies, Europe: A History

“Nothing better illustrated the realities of the Soviet collapse than the fate of Sergei Krikalyev, a Soviet cosmonaut who was fired into space in May 1991. He was still circling the earth at the end of the year for want of a decision to bring him back. He had left a Soviet Union that was still a superpower; he would return to a world from which the Soviet Union had disappeared. His controllers at the Baikonur Space Centre found themselves in the independent republic of Kazakhstan.”
― Norman Davies, Europe: A History

“The most obvious fact of the Soviet collapse is that it happened through natural causes. The Soviet Union was not, like ancient Rome, invaded by barbarians or, like the Polish Commonwealth, partitioned by rapacious neighbours, or, like the Habsburg Empire, overwhelmed by the strains of a great war. It was not, like the Nazi Reich, defeated in a fight to the death. It died because it had to, because the grotesque organs of its internal structure were incapable of providing the essentials of life. In a nuclear age, it could not, like its tsarist predecessor, solve its internal problems by expansion. Nor could it suck more benefit from the nations whom it had captured. It could not tolerate the partnership with China which once promised a global future for communism; it could not stand the oxygen of reform; so it imploded. It was struck down by the political equivalent of a coronary, more massive than anything that history affords.”
― Norman Davies, Europe: A History

“They [combatants in the Thirty Years' War] wanted peace and they fought for thirty years to be sure of it. They did not learn then, and have not learned since, that war only breeds war.”
― Norman Davies, Europe: A History

“The formula Muscovy + Ukraine = Russia does not feature in the Russians’ own version of their history; but it is fundamental.”
― Norman Davies, Europe: A History

“Discord among the ex-Soviet nationalities was fuelling an ugly brand of Russian nationalism. Voices in Moscow called for the re-conquest of Russia’s ‘near abroad’. For after Abkhazia, there waited several further targets for Russian intervention, including Tatarstan and Chechenia, and other non-Russian lands within the Russian Federation. Sooner or later, Russia would be forced to choose between its new-style democracy and its old-style imperialism.”
― Norman Davies, Europe: A History

“Arguably, the only fruit of the Crusades kept by the Christians was the apricot.”
― Norman Davies, Europe: A history from the ice age to the modern age

“The title ‘Lord of All-Rus'’ did not possess much basis either in history or in current reality. It came into the same category as that whereby the kings of England laid claim to France. In the 1490s, two-and-a-half centuries after all traces of a united Kievan Rus' had been destroyed, it had the same degree of credibility that the king of France might have enjoyed if, in his struggle with the German Empire, he had proclaimed himself ‘Lord of all the Franks’. By that time, it conflicted with the separate identity that the ‘Ruthenes’ of Lithuania had assumed from the ‘Russians’ of Moscow. Indeed, it all seemed sufficiently unreal for the Lithuanians to accept it as a small price to pay for Ivan’s good humour. They were not to know it, but they were conceding the ideological cornerstone of territorial ambitions that would be pursued for 500 years.”
― Norman Davies, Europe: A History

“The debased coinage of his reign bore his initials, ICR: Iohannes Casimirus Rex. These were taken to stand for Initium Calamitatum Reipublicae, the Beginning of the Republic’s Catastrophes.”
― Norman Davies, Europe: A history from the ice age to the modern age

“Maria Theresa dollar of 1751.”
― Norman Davies, Europe: A history from the ice age to the modern age

“By the seventeenth century the thaler had become a unit of currency all over central Europe. It had also been copied in Habsburg Spain, whose taleros or ‘pieces of eight’ circulated throughout the Americas. They were known in English as ‘dollars’.”
― Norman Davies, Europe: A history from the ice age to the modern age

“Grain prices in France, for example, where the supply of coin was relatively scarce, were over seven times higher in 1600 than in 1500.”
― Norman Davies, Europe: A history from the ice age to the modern age