Top 10 Norman Davies Quotes (2025 Update)

Norman Davies Quote: “Reconstructing the past is rather like translating poetry. It can be done, but never exactly.”

1. “Reconstructing the past is rather like translating poetry. It can be done, but never exactly.”

2. “Only a Christian culture could have produced a Voltaire or a Nietzsche. I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian Faith.”

— Norman Davies

3. “The immediate future may be determined by a race between the United Kingdom and the EU over which beats the other to a major crisis.”

— Norman Davies

4. “The Fascist utopia, like that of the Communists, was false, and generated immense suffering. But there were those who dreamed it sincerely.”

— Norman Davies

5. “An ambassador’, quipped Sir Henry Wootton, ’is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.”

— Norman Davies

6. “The big question about the hunter-gatherers, therefore, does not seem to be ‘How did they progress towards the higher level of an agricultural and politicised society?’ but ‘What persuaded them to abandon the secure, well-provided and psychologically liberating advantages of their primordial lifestyle?’.1.”

— Norman Davies

$Norman Davies Quote: “All the nations that ever lived have left their footsteps in the sand. The traces fade with every tide, the echoes grow faint, the images are fractured, the human material is atomized and recycled. But if we know where to look, there is always a remnant, a remainder, an irreducible residue.”$

7. “All the nations that ever lived have left their footsteps in the sand. The traces fade with every tide, the echoes grow faint, the images are fractured, the human material is atomized and recycled. But if we know where to look, there is always a remnant, a remainder, an irreducible residue.”

— Norman Davies