Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Most Poles are by temperament 'agin'.
Poland is the natural bridge between East and West.
None of Europe's modern nations are genuinely native.
Law and Justice are the most vindictive gang in Europe.
The Russian myths of the Second World War are still intact.
The United Kingdom is not, and never has been, a nation state.
[The Poles] will die for their country; but few will work for it.
A bad historian is even more dangerous than dead documentary wood.
The Black Sea is Eastern Europe's counterpart to the Mediterranean.
Europe's fragmentation puts the wider historical picture beyond reach.
The 'politics of memory' policy appears to work largely by insinuation.
Nothing stands still. Everything is moving in some direction or another.
Winners of wars get a standing start in the post-war stakes of remembrance.
All states and nations, however great, bloom for a season and are replaced.
It is important to remember that John Paul II was not an American or a Frenchman.
All political institutions will end sooner or later. The question is when and how.
Myth-making is absolutely necessary to create the simplified images that people live off.
The most noticeable thing about the Soviet collapse was that it followed a natural course.
Capacity of human societies both to absorb and to discard cultures is much underestimated.
History must give the Poles the principal credit for bringing the Soviet bloc to its knees.
There is a real danger of the United Kingdom breaking up. There is a loss of common identity.
Nearly all interested parties think I write too shortly on the subjects that interest them most.
Our mental maps are distorted by who are the 'winners' of history and who are the powers of today.
The one certainly for anyone in the path of an avalanche is this: standing still is not an option.
I find myself sick to death, tired of arguing about details with people who don't know basic facts.
I do belong to the club which doesn't see a distinction between academic history and popular history.
In essence, the tragedy of the Warsaw Rising resulted from a systemic breakdown of the Grand Alliance.
It's our vanity that makes us think that what forms part of our world today must be stable and secure.
I happen to belong to that group opinion which holds the break-up of the United Kingdom to be imminent.
Bulgaria was the only Axis country to deflect insistent German demands for the deportation of its Jews.
It's the historian's job not to ridicule the myths, but to show the difference between myth and reality.
Transience is one of the fundamental characteristics both of the human condition and of the political order.
Only by painting the great panorama of history, can the great history-reading public be entertained or satisfied.
The Euro Sceptics are the English National Party in disguise, and they have poor old David Cameron over a barrel.
It was in the 20th century that national sovereignty really ruled the roost, and the E.U. was formed to cure that.
Why are some things remembered and others forgotten? That is the theme I want to pursue about the Second World War.
The Law and Justice government does not want a bunch of foreign historians to decide what goes on in 'their' museum.
Every austerity measure that Cameron and George Osborne make is being presented in Scotland as the English starving us.
Poland was the racial laboratory of the Nazis. This is where they started to put their abhorrent theories into practice.
Any historian worth their salt should be aware of wars, conflicts, catastrophes. They happen. This is part of the panorama.
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.
One of the few things that can be said for certain about Europe's prehistoric peoples is that they all came from somewhere else.
The idea that historians write the definitive version of something that will last for all time is less current than it used to be.
So long as classical education and classical prejudices prevailed, educated Englishmen inevitably saw ancient Britain as an alien land.
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.
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.
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.
Each side tries to legitimize their aims by appealing to history, sometimes selectively choosing episodes and other times just by inventing history.
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.
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.