Norman Davies Quotes

As a folklorist, I have come to believe that no piece of folklore continues to be transmitted unless it means something - even if neither the speaker nor the audience can articulate what that meaning might be.

History is like Santa Claus: a language construction. We have some registers about the existence of Santa and history - the presents under the tree, the archives - but none have really seen them.

We control the world basically because we are the only animals that can cooperate flexibly in very large numbers. And if you examine any large-scale human cooperation, you will always find that it is based on some fiction like the nation, like money, like human rights.

The human world is made of stories, not people. The people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed

We only exist in terms of how we think we exist. Meaning every cultural development is fabricated and can be fabricated.

There's a reason that all societies and cultures and small bands of humans engage in myth-making. Fundamentally, it is to help us understand ourselves.

All the great legends are Templates for human behavior. I would define a myth as a story that has survived.

Cinema is a reflection of its own society.

Human beings have always been mythmakers.

A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.

An atmosphere of beliefs and conceptions has been formed by the labours and struggles of our forefathers, which enables us to breathe amid the various and complex circumstances of our life.

Into this, for good or ill, is woven every belief of every man who has speech of his fellows. A awful privilege, and an awful responsibility, that we should help to create the world in which posterity will live.

Just as nature abhors a vacuum, so a culture will find some kind of grand narrative of itself to feed upon, even a poisonous one.

It is important to recognize that folklore is not simply a way of obtaining available date about identity for social scientists; it is actually one of the principal means by which an individual and a group discovers or establishes his or its identity.

Myth and mythology often serve constructive and aspirational purposes. But they also do harm.

I think the basic thing that happened is we have lost our story. Humans think in stories, and we try to make sense of the world by telling stories.

I don't think that I can tell any story better than the story of my own country, than the stories of my own countrymen.

The truly unique trait of 'Sapiens' is our ability to create and believe fiction. All other animals use their communication system to describe reality. We use our communication system to create new realities. Of course, not all fictions are shared by all humans, but at least one has become universal in our world, and this is money.

Stories bring us together. We can talk about them and bond over them. They are shared knowledge, shared legend, and shared history; often, they shape our shared future.

I'm very interested in foundational narratives.

The human world is made of stories, not people.

Movies really have replaced what traditionally were mythologies, that every culture had their mythological beliefs and their collective 'stories.' There is now the possibility for movies to embody that arising new state of consciousness.

Every culture has their myths that people are aware of and share.

Stories are made up by people who make them up. If they work, they get retold. There's the magic of it.

Symbols give us our identity, our self image, our way of explaining ourselves to ourselves and to others. Symbols in turn determine the kinds of stories we tell, and the stories we tell determine the kind of history we make and remake.