The historical profession is nowhere famous for its tolerance, but there are not many countries where historians can expect to pay for their opinions with penal servitude or the firing squad.
Norman DaviesRead
Each side tries to legitimize their aims by appealing to history, sometimes selectively choosing episodes and other times just by inventing history.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote highlights how differing perspectives on history can be manipulated to justify agendas.
Norman Davies emphasizes that various sides in a debate or conflict often attempt to validate their positions by revisiting historical events. This can involve selectively highlighting certain occurrences or even fabricating history to support their narratives, illustrating the complexity and subjectivity in interpreting the past.
Themes
HistoryManipulationPerspectiveNarrativeTruth
In practice
Example use cases
In a history class discussing how different countries interpret World War II.
More from Norman Davies
All quotes βTransience is one of the fundamental characteristics both of the human condition and of the political order.
Norman DaviesRead
Nowadays, it is no longer possible to maintain that the Nazi-Soviet pact of 23 August 1939 was a fiction invented by bourgeois-imperialist enemies. Everyone has seen the film clips of Herr Ribbentrop landing in Moscow, and of Stalin smiling broadly as Ribbentrop and Molotov signed up side by side.
Norman DaviesRead
Why are some things remembered and others forgotten? That is the theme I want to pursue about the Second World War.
Norman DaviesRead
Our mental maps are distorted by who are the 'winners' of history and who are the powers of today.
Norman DaviesRead
One might have thought that 70 years was time enough to work out what really happened in 1939. It isn't the case. Misunderstandings and misinformation abound.
Norman DaviesRead
Similar quotes
When the gospel is at stake, everything is at stake.
R. C. SproulRead
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
George OrwellRead
Nevertheless, the central affirmation of the Reformation stands: through no merit of ours, but by his mercy, WE HAVE BEEN RESTORED to a right relationship with God through the life, death, and resurrection of his beloved Son. This is the Good News, the gospel of Grace
Brennan ManningRead
Let us not forget that the reasons for human actions are usually incalculably more complex and diverse than we tend to explain them later, and are seldom clearly manifest.
Fyodor DostoevskyRead
People crushed by law have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws.
Thomas Babington MacaulayRead
For myself I think that one wrong does not right the other, and forgiveness cannot be won with useless tears or alms to the Church.
Jose RizalRead