All Simon Schama Quotes
- But it struck me that the extreme violence and cruelty of the English Civil War had gone understated. Civil
- 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… Aware
- There are some places where history just grabs you by the jugular. This is one of them. Civil War
- 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… America
- 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… Authority
- Even for the most excitable preacher, there was nothing inherently sinful about a waffle. Excitable
- The next worse thing to a battle lost is a battle won. Battle
- 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.… Ballpark
- DIY, cricket, automobile repair. I could study it for a lifetime and not produce a word on the carburettor. Automobile
- What can art really do in the face of atrocity? Art
- 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… 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… Always Made
- 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.… 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… Act
- These men were very much in the minority, but of course, being the 'Elect', they expected to be in a minority - the party of… Army
- Charles was constitutionally incapable of being a constitutional monarch. Charles
- 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… Came
- Almost everywhere else in Europe, the more military the state, the stronger the king - except in Britain. Here it was parliament, not the monarchy,… Almost Everywhere
- 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,… America
- Irreverence is the lifeblood of freedom. Freedom