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1 " It is indeed the duty of historians to stress the contrast betweenthe standards of the past and the standards of the present. Somefulfil that duty on purpose, others by accident. "
― Norman Davies , Europe: A History
2 " Reconstructing the past is rather like translating poetry. It can be done, but never exactly. "
3 " To make his point, Ivan staged a sensational demonstration. Some time before Christmas he had arrested two Lithuanians employed in the Moscow Kremlin. He charged them with plotting to poison him. The accusations against Jan Lukhomski and Maciej the Pole did not sound very credible; but their guilt or innocence was hardly relevant. They were held in an open cage on the frozen Moskva River for all the world to see; and on the eve of the departure of Ivan’s envoy to Lithuania, they were burned alive in their cage.50 As the ice melted under the fierce heat of the fire and the heavy iron cage sank beneath the water, taking its carbonized occupants down in a great hiss of steam, one could have well imagined that something was being said about Lithuania’s political future. "
4 " The title ‘Lord of All-Rus'’ did not possess much basis either in history or in current reality. It came into the same category as that whereby the kings of England laid claim to France. In the 1490s, two-and-a-half centuries after all traces of a united Kievan Rus' had been destroyed, it had the same degree of credibility that the king of France might have enjoyed if, in his struggle with the German Empire, he had proclaimed himself ‘Lord of all the Franks’. By that time, it conflicted with the separate identity that the ‘Ruthenes’ of Lithuania had assumed from the ‘Russians’ of Moscow. Indeed, it all seemed sufficiently unreal for the Lithuanians to accept it as a small price to pay for Ivan’s good humour. They were not to know it, but they were conceding the ideological cornerstone of territorial ambitions that would be pursued for 500 years. "
5 " The Fascist utopia, like that of the Communists, was false, and generated immense suffering. But there were those who dreamed it sincerely. "
6 " 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. "
7 " Wcześniej czy później dekonstrukcjonistów zdekonstruują ich własne metody. "Przeżyliśmy Śmierć Boga i Śmierć Człowieka. Z pewnością przeżyjemy także Śmierć Historii... i Śmierć Postmodernizmu. "
8 " An ambassador’, quipped Sir Henry Wootton, ‘is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country. "
9 " Culture is something that must grow. You cannot build a tree; you can only plant it, and care for it, and wait for it to mature . . . "
10 " 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 "
11 " By 1939 the Gulag was the largest employer in Europe. "
12 " Arguably, the only fruit of the Crusades kept by the Christians was the apricot. "
13 " We have survived the “Death of God” and the “Death of Man”. We will surely survive “the Death of History” . . . and the death of post-modernism. "
14 " The Muslim Era of Hegira, which marks the flight of the Prophet from Mecca, corresponds to Friday, 16 July AD 622. "
15 " NOMISMA, MEANING ‘COIN’, was used by both Greeks and Romans. Our own word ‘money’ derives, via the French monnaie, from the Latin moneta, meaning the mint, where coins are struck. (In early Rome the mint was situated on the Capitoline Hill in the temple of Juno Moneta.) "
16 " So long as men slaughter animals,’ the master said, ‘they won’t stop killing each other.’1 [KONOPIПTE] "
17 " According to whether one follows St Luke or St Matthew, the Christian Era began either in the last year of Herod the Great (4 BC) or in the year of the first Roman census in Judaea (AD 6–7). "
18 " The debased coinage of his reign bore his initials, ICR: Iohannes Casimirus Rex. These were taken to stand for Initium Calamitatum Reipublicae, the Beginning of the Republic’s Catastrophes. "
19 " As from the 1490s, the double-headed eagle began to appear as the symbol of state in Moscow as in Vienna, as indeed in Constantinople. "
20 " Also in 1492, and also for the first time, the ‘new Constantinople—Moscow’ may have been given its more familiar label of ‘the Third Rome’. "
