Simon Schama Quotes

57 quotes in 949 categories

• 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 raggedly…
• Charlie Hebdo: Satire was the father of true political freedom, born in the 18th century; the scourge of bigots and tyrants. Sing its praises.
• I don't really like the autumn. For me it is the beginning of winter and I hate the winter. White, the colour of death.
• Walking on camera is damn hard. It's a Jewish problem. The rangy stride across the blasted moor is not really a Jewish thing.
• In the end, history, especially British history with its succession of thrilling illuminations, should be, as all her most accomplished narrators have promised, not just…
• In its Greek origins, historia meant inquiry, and from Thucydides onwards, the past has been studied to understand its connections with the present.
• Jews can live their own life as Jews and yet be part of a different country.
• The Jewish story is the story of wandering. It is the story of extraordinary heterogeneous complication.
• We seem wired to grieve with greenery. Allowing the dead to dissolve into the earth, to become part of the cycle of the seasons, has,…
• By the end of the nineteenth century, the stereotype of the ugly American - voracious, preachy, mercenary, and bombastically chauvinist - was firmly in place…
• The British who arrived in the United States in the eighteen-thirties and forties had imagined the young republic as a wide-eyed adolescent, socially ungainly and…
• The default mode of modern writing about art is to despise any notion of singularity as so much overheated genius-fetishism.
• Sculptures created from found materials like ice and thorns, driftwood, and even bleached kangaroo bones all presuppose that artistic design will yield to the cycles…
• You are not thinking hard enough if you are sleeping well. And you would have to be unhinged to take on a subject like the…
• I find it very hard to write about Jewish history.
• The Elephantine papyri - written as some of the books of the Bible are being written - is true social and legal documentation, and to…
• I am strongly of the opinion that chronology is very important. The great arc of time is what children are wired for.
• History is admirably dangerous. It is not the soft option. Teachers need to be grown up and brave. Sensitivity is fine, but it stops at…
• I felt New York was a big, more stylish, more metropolitan Golders Green. I was thrilled.
• If someone asks me to go to speak at, say, Princeton, I might or might not go. But if someone asks me from Norman, Oklahoma,…

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