Simon Schama Quotes

57 quotes in 949 categories

• The Bible, for all its riches, is not a document of social history.
• It was the Sephardi Jews who brought fish and chips to Britain, actually, believe it or not, from the Mediterranean world. Apart from actually eating…
• Passover takes place in the home rather than the synagogue and centers around an epic meal - the seder - so you remember Passover as…
• The most gloomy prognosis about Jewish life is that it will disappear between the two extremes of ultra-Orthodoxy on the one hand and total assimilation…
• I wrote a staggeringly bad poem when I was 19 after a girlfriend dumped me. I seem to remember comparing her to a tarantula. It…
• As a schoolboy, poetry seemed defined by preciousness. It was all very rarefied.
• I actually think that history has fed off the restlessness of cyber space, of kind of the frantic, segmented nature of the way we lead…
• Jews have never, ever, ever wished to be separate, unless they were forced to be.
• In Mesopotamia or Egypt, for example, the monarch had a god-like religious status. But this is not the case in Judaism. So that notion that…
• The synagogues of late antiquity and the early medieval period were built around imagery: imagery of remembering the Temple, but also of the celestial zodiac,…
• The challenge for a nonfiction writer is to achieve a poetic precision using the documents of truth but somehow to make people and places spring…
• Jewish history turns out not to be an either/or story - as in, either pure Judaism detached from its surroundings or else assimilation - but…
• At 11, 12, I thought I was clumsy, ugly, a mess, an unappealing person, but I did have the gift of the gab. I had…
• I am not very relaxed about bad reviews. But I am resilient. I grieve, curse and swear, put on loud music, and get on with…
• History gives you insight of the same quality of truth as poetry or philosophy or a novel.
• It takes a perverse determination to drain that instinctive curiosity away and make history seem just remote, dead and disconnected from our contemporary reality. Conversely,…
• The older I get, the more I want to do. It beats death, decay or golf in unfortunate trousers. Peace and quiet depress me.

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