“Serenity is the balance between good and bad, life and death, horrors and pleasures. Life is, as it were, defined by death. If there wasn’t death of things, then there wouldn’t be any life to celebrate.”
“Only by painting the great panorama of history, can the great history-reading public be entertained or satisfied.”
“In the years of the Red Terror that followed the Bolshevik Revolution, the voice of dissent was stifled by universal denunciations, house searches, and preventive arrests.”
“People don’t see very often their death coming… Look at the French Revolution: The king of France was thinking in the 1780s, ‘We’re doing rather better than my father in the 1770s.’”
“Law and Justice are the most vindictive gang in Europe.”
“Any historian worth their salt should be aware of wars, conflicts, catastrophes. They happen. This is part of the panorama.”
“The one certainly for anyone in the path of an avalanche is this: standing still is not an option.”
“I first heard of General Anders and his army more than 50 years ago. I admired him then, and I admire him still; and I feel a special bond with the men, women and children whom he rescued from hunger, disease, and official abuse. Theirs is a story of endurance and fortitude that gives one faith in the human spirit.”
“Nothing stands still. Everything is moving in some direction or another.”
“Our mental maps are distorted by who are the ‘winners’ of history and who are the powers of today.”
“For people familiar with Eastern Europe, Marci Shore’s ‘The Taste of Ashes’ is, in spite of its subject matter, delicious. A professor at Yale with much experience in Eastern Europe, she writes with great sureness of touch, weaving personal recollections with intellectual commentary and ideas with emotions, including her own.”
“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.”
“I find myself sick to death, tired of arguing about details with people who don’t know basic facts.”
“Myth-making is absolutely necessary to create the simplified images that people live off.”
“It’s the historian’s job not to ridicule the myths, but to show the difference between myth and reality.”
“I always needle a bit when people say I’m a champion of the Poles, because I’ve always had a very multinational view of Poland.”
“The Russian myths of the Second World War are still intact.”
“The last years of fading communism provided an ideal environment for Poland’s Catholic Church, which acted as an umbrella for dissenters of all sorts.”
“It is important to remember that John Paul II was not an American or a Frenchman.”
“Poland in the 1990s saw a surge of unrestrained, American-style capitalism. With millions of Poles living in the U.S.A., the defeat of communism led many to aim for a lifestyle derivative of Chicago or Detroit.”
“There is a real danger of the United Kingdom breaking up. There is a loss of common identity.”
“The Euro Sceptics are the English National Party in disguise, and they have poor old David Cameron over a barrel.”
“Every austerity measure that Cameron and George Osborne make is being presented in Scotland as the English starving us.”
“It’s unimaginable to meet a Pole or a German who does not know about the history of their country. But lots of English people don’t know the difference between Britain and England.”
“I do belong to the club which doesn’t see a distinction between academic history and popular history.”
“I don’t see why a book shouldn’t be intellectually sound, entertaining, and fun to read. Historians who write academic history, which is unreadable, are basically wasting their time.”
“History is very much bound up in family experience.”
“History must give the Poles the principal credit for bringing the Soviet bloc to its knees.”
“Poland is the natural bridge between East and West.”
“In the long run, Europe will certainly move toward unification. But it will be a process of push and pull, and there will be resistance.”
“Each side tries to legitimize their aims by appealing to history, sometimes selectively choosing episodes and other times just by inventing history.”
“The E.U. is an organization that was created after the Second World War for calming down the nationalism of member states, and it did so very successfully.”
“It was in the 20th century that national sovereignty really ruled the roost, and the E.U. was formed to cure that.”
“So long as classical education and classical prejudices prevailed, educated Englishmen inevitably saw ancient Britain as an alien land.”
“Traditionally, historians thought in terms of invasions: the Celts took over the islands, then the Romans, then the Anglo-Saxons. It now seems much more likely that the resident population doesn’t change as much as thought. The people stay put but are reculturalized by some new dominant culture.”
“The Law and Justice government does not want a bunch of foreign historians to decide what goes on in ‘their’ museum.”
“The ‘politics of memory’ policy appears to work largely by insinuation.”
“Why does a state last a thousand years? Why not 999? Why not a thousand and one? What are the events that finally bring the whole thing down? That is what I am asking.”
“States seem to have a natural life cycle, and anything can occur to change them into something else, and that something might be no bad thing.”
“All political institutions will end sooner or later. The question is when and how.”
“It’s our vanity that makes us think that what forms part of our world today must be stable and secure.”
“The idea that historians write the definitive version of something that will last for all time is less current than it used to be.”
“All states and nations, however great, bloom for a season and are replaced.”
“Poland was the racial laboratory of the Nazis. This is where they started to put their abhorrent theories into practice.”
“In 1945, when the Second World War technically ends in Poland, the incoming Soviet army liberates some groups of people but begins to oppress the general population, in some ways more harshly than it had happened before.”
“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.”
“Winners of wars get a standing start in the post-war stakes of remembrance.”
“Bulgaria was the only Axis country to deflect insistent German demands for the deportation of its Jews.”
“A bad historian is even more dangerous than dead documentary wood.”
“Nearly all interested parties think I write too shortly on the subjects that interest them most.”
“There is history in condoms, there is history in lampshades, there is history in everything.”
“I first came across the Anders Army story by accident. When I first went to live in Oxford in the 1960s, I discovered that some of my close neighbours had been on the Anders trail.”
“I wanted to produce a book that would demonstrate not only the rich diversity of people who answered to Anders’s command but also the extraordinary variety of their experiences and emotions: from death to despair, fear and longings and eventually to hope.”
“The most noticeable thing about the Soviet collapse was that it followed a natural course.”
“Young people have to learn in a cocoon filled with false optimism. Unlike their parents and grandparents, they grow up with very little sense of the pitiless passage of time.”
“One of the few things that can be said for certain about Europe’s prehistoric peoples is that they all came from somewhere else.”
“None of Europe’s modern nations are genuinely native.”
“I happen to belong to that group opinion which holds the break-up of the United Kingdom to be imminent.”
“The advance of standard English culture was less assisted by government policy than by the sheer weight, wealth, and number of England’s well-established cultural institutions.”
“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.”
“Under Lenin, hardly less than under Stalin, historians harbored critical opinions at their peril. The writing, let alone the publication, of political diaries was virtually impossible.”
“Fifty years would seem to be time enough to prepare a definitive history of the Second World War. In an age of instant data-gathering, one might think that the historians could have arrived at a consensus for interpreting the main events of the war. In reality, no such consensus exists.”
“Why are some things remembered and others forgotten? That is the theme I want to pursue about the Second World War.”
“I can just remember the blitz of Manchester, or perhaps my father’s tales about the blitz of Manchester. I can remember the blackout, the powdered eggs, and the gas masks. But I think no British person should pretend that being resident in England could count as being in the thick of the action.”
“The Black Sea is Eastern Europe’s counterpart to the Mediterranean.”
“The shores of the Black Sea lend themselves to the literary genre that may be classified as ‘cultural pilgrimage,’ which is not just a higher form of travel writing but which has the further mission of reporting on present conditions and supplying neglected knowledge.”
“In essence, the tragedy of the Warsaw Rising resulted from a systemic breakdown of the Grand Alliance.”
“Transience is one of the fundamental characteristics both of the human condition and of the political order.”
“Capacity of human societies both to absorb and to discard cultures is much underestimated.”
“Northern Ireland must, in future, be absorbed into the Irish republic. Wales and Scotland must advance from devolution to full independent status. The four nations of these islands must commit themselves absolutely to the project of a United Europe.”
“The United Kingdom is not, and never has been, a nation state.”
“The question is whether a confident Europe will be a rival for North America – or whether they will work together and become a more unified bloc.”
“In the 21st century, there will probably be a reflex against the disintegration of traditional European culture. What started as a reaction will come full circle, and there will be a return to the roots.”
“Historical change is like an avalanche. The starting point is a snow-covered mountainside that looks solid. All changes take place under the surface and are rather invisible.”
“At the end of the Roman Empire, in the Byzantine period, the empire shrinks and shrinks until it consists of one city, Constantinople, and the Ottoman Turks can encircle it.”
“One of the problems in the Ukrainian crisis is that very few Westerners know their history, or if they know it, what they learn is what we call the Russian version of history.”
“Europe’s fragmentation puts the wider historical picture beyond reach.”
Leave a Reply