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
We are not accusing you of being illegal, we are accusing you of being immoral.
Margaret HodgeRead
Wars will remain while human nature remains. I believe in my soul in cooperation, in arbitration; but the soldier's occupation we cannot say is gone until human nature is gone.
Rutherford B. HayesRead
For this is the truth about our soul, he thought, who fish-like inhabits deep seas and plies among obscurities threading her way between the boles of giant weeds, over sun-flickered spaces and on and on into gloom, cold, deep, inscrutable; suddenly she shoots to the surface and sports on the wind-wrinkled waves; that is, has a positive need to brush, scrape, kindle herself, gossiping.
Virginia WoolfRead
It is an axiom in my mind that our liberty can never be safe but in the hands of the people themselves, and that too of the people with a certain degree of instruction. This it is the business of the state to effect, and on a general plan.
Thomas JeffersonRead
Would you require a wretched being, whose life is slowly wasting under a lingering disease, to despatch himself at once by the stroke of a dagger? Does not the very disorder which consumes his strength deprive him of the courage to effect his deliverance?
Johann Wolfgang Von GoetheRead
No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by that word. It is every individual's individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol - cross or crescent or whatever - that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race.
William FaulknerRead