History gives you insight of the same quality of truth as poetry or philosophy or a novel. — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
From the very beginning, history wasn't content simply to be nostalgic fairytales; it wanted to make you think. — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
The difficulty with poetry is that it doesn't have the life that Shakespeare or Jane Austen have beyond the page. You can't… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
St. Paul was making it impossible to be Jewish and Christian at the same time. What is very striking about those early… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
The notion that religion can actually be something... attached to progressivism seems so bizarre. But all you have to say is that… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
Growing up in Britain as a rather loose Jew, the two things that didn't belong together were freedom and religious intensity. In… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
I do not want to be misunderstood that you need a dose of persecution in order, really, to have a sense of… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
America is truly special because it's founded on an idea. It's the ideological and philosophical equivalent of a formless God, in other… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
Passover takes place in the home rather than the synagogue and centers around an epic meal - the seder - so you… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
You are not thinking hard enough if you are sleeping well. And you would have to be unhinged to take on a… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
Histories never conclude; they just pause their prose. Their stories are, if they are truthful, untidy affairs, resistant to windings-up and sortings-out. They beat… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
The difficulty with poetry is that it doesn't have the life that Shakespeare or Jane Austen have beyond the page. You can't make a… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
Taxation, the very thing that had triggered the British civil wars, would do so again, this time in America. The taxes may have been… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
Anyone can write an academic piece directed at other academics. To write something that delivers an argument and a gripping storyline to someone's granny… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
In its Greek origins, historia meant inquiry, and from Thucydides onwards, the past has been studied to understand its connections with the present. — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
Jewish history turns out not to be an either/or story - as in, either pure Judaism detached from its surroundings or else assimilation -… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
Growing up in Britain as a rather loose Jew, the two things that didn't belong together were freedom and religious intensity. In America, they… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
In the end, history, especially British history with its succession of thrilling illuminations, should be, as all her most accomplished narrators have promised, not… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
From 1789, perhaps even before that, it had been the willingness of politicians to exploit either the threat or the fact of violence that… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
The default mode of modern writing about art is to despise any notion of singularity as so much overheated genius-fetishism. — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
The synagogues of late antiquity and the early medieval period were built around imagery: imagery of remembering the Temple, but also of the celestial… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
At 11, 12, I thought I was clumsy, ugly, a mess, an unappealing person, but I did have the gift of the gab. I… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
