Norman Davies Quotes

There is no such thing as a final draft of history.

History must always be taken with a grain of salt. It is, after all, not a science but an art.

Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.

I find that the history books that we teach our kids with are not fully truthful, in my opinion.

One duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

I think fiction recues history from its confusions.

Most academic historians accept that historians' own circumstances demand that they tell the story in a particular way, of course. While people wring their hands about 'revisionist' historians; on some level, the correction and amplification of various parts of the past is not 'revisionism' as it is simply the process of any historical writing.

History does not produce definitive answers for all time. It is a process.

Even the most meticulous historians work subjectively. The historian's point of view, his or her selection of subject and sources, the emphasis, the tone - all of these lead to subjective history, inevitably so. I do not say this as a criticism, merely as an observation.

The case against the notion of historical objectivity is like the case against international law, or international morality; that it does not exist.

History is an illogical record. It hinges on nothing. It is a story that changes, and has accidents, and recovers with scars.

The impartiality of history is not that of the mirror, which merely reflects objects, but of the judge, who sees, listens, and decides.

My opinion is that politicians should be humble in the face of history. And whenever history is a matter of debate, it should be left in the hands of historians and experts.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

History is always changing.

History is only conjecture, and the best historians try to do it as accurately as they can. They try to accurately reassemble the facts and then put them down on paper.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

It is the job of the historian to say what is likely, and of faith to say what is possible.

I am not trying to be a historian and a dramatist; I'm a dramatist, a dramatic historian, or one who does a dramatic interpretation of history.

Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.

I got history solidly under my belt, reading Russian history and biographies. I couldn't change the facts. I could only play with how the people might have responded to the facts of their lives.

Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history - revisionist historians is what I like to call them.

If history starts as a guest list, it has a tendency to end like the memory of a drunken party: misheard, blurred, fragmentary.

Any child knows that history can only be a reduced representation of reality, but it must be a true one, not distorted by queer lenses.

I was thinking of writing a little foreword saying that history is, after all, based on people's recollections, which change with time.