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Serenity is the balance between good and bad, life and death, horrors and pleasures. Life is, as it were, defined by death. If there wasn't death of things, then there wouldn't be any life to celebrate.
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All states and nations, however great, bloom for a season and are replaced.
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The 'politics of memory' policy appears to work largely by insinuation.
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The idea that historians write the definitive version of something that will last for all time is less current than it used to be.
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Poland is the natural bridge between East and West.
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Nothing stands still. Everything is moving in some direction or another.
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Myth-making is absolutely necessary to create the simplified images that people live off.
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History is very much bound up in family experience.
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A bad historian is even more dangerous than dead documentary wood.
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It's the historian's job not to ridicule the myths, but to show the difference between myth and reality.
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Each side tries to legitimize their aims by appealing to history, sometimes selectively choosing episodes and other times just by inventing history.