Simon Schama Quotes

57 quotes in 949 categories

• But it struck me that the extreme violence and cruelty of the English Civil War had gone understated.
• Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their…
• There are some places where history just grabs you by the jugular. This is one of them.
• From the days of the Founding Fathers, right to this (2008) election, how and where America fights to defend its freedom, has been the ultimate…
• From 1789, perhaps even before that, it had been the willingness of politicians to exploit either the threat or the fact of violence that had…
• Even for the most excitable preacher, there was nothing inherently sinful about a waffle.
• The next worse thing to a battle lost is a battle won.
• I'm helplessly and permanently a Red Sox fan. It was like first love...You never forget. It's special. It's the first time I saw a ballpark.…
• DIY, cricket, automobile repair. I could study it for a lifetime and not produce a word on the carburettor.
• What can art really do in the face of atrocity?
• Great art has dreadful manners. The greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure, and then proceed in short order to re-arrange…
• Landscapes are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock. It is... difficult to think of a…
• The great theme of modern British history is the fate of freedom. The 18th century inherits, after the Civil War, this very peculiar political animal.…
• To collude in the minimisation of British history on the grounds of its imagined irrelevance to our rebranded national future, or from a suspicion that…
• These men were very much in the minority, but of course, being the 'Elect', they expected to be in a minority - the party of…
• Charles was constitutionally incapable of being a constitutional monarch.
• The irony about Charles II is not that he came to the throne because England needed a successor to Charles I, but because England needed…
• Almost everywhere else in Europe, the more military the state, the stronger the king - except in Britain. Here it was parliament, not the monarchy,…
• Taxation, the very thing that had triggered the British civil wars, would do so again, this time in America. The taxes may have been different,…
• Irreverence is the lifeblood of freedom.

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