Schama Quotes

#1. 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 documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.

Simon Schama

#2. 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. I'd thought nothing would ever replace cricket. Wow! Fenway Park at 7 o'clock in the evening. Oh, just, magic beyond magic: never got over that

Simon Schama

#3. These men were very much in the minority, but of course, being the 'Elect', they expected to be in a minority - the party of redemption. In fact they glorified in the slightness of their numbers, the self-purifying troop of Gideon's army ... stormtroopers in the front line of the Reformation.

Simon Schama

#4. 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, it just takes skilful storytelling to recharge that connection to make the past come alive in our present.

Simon Schama

#5. From the very beginning, history wasn't content simply to be nostalgic fairytales; it wanted to make you think.

Simon Schama

#6. I find it very hard to write about Jewish history.

Simon Schama

#7. By the end of the nineteenth century, the stereotype of the ugly American - voracious, preachy, mercenary, and bombastically chauvinist - was firmly in place in Europe.

Simon Schama

#8. When imperial powers fray at the edges, ethnic groups perceived to be the beneficiaries of their trust suddenly start to look like aliens not natives, however long they may have been settled.

Simon Schama

#9. I am passionately invested in the survival of Israel and everything Israel represents. But I am extremely critical of much of its policy. I believe that the occupation must end. And if it doesn't, it will end Israel. I'm not in favor of settlements.

Simon Schama

#10. I used to have a monthly cookery column, and am a big cook, so that whole sense of connecting what one does with food to one's cultural identity has always been fascinating to me.

Simon Schama

#11. Jews can live their own life as Jews and yet be part of a different country.

Simon Schama

#12. I first read War And Peace about 100 years after Tolstoy wrote it.

Simon Schama

#13. I have this magpie instinct for the next glittering object. There are one or two things I know I can't write about, though: DIY, cricket, automobile repair. I could study it for a lifetime and not produce a word on the carburettor.

Simon Schama

#14. My mother was an awful cook, an exceptionally awful kosher cook, but I stayed kosher until I got to college, even though I'd long stopped believing in God.

Simon Schama

#15. I would want the British reader to feel that religion in America isn't an absurd thing - a sign of a pin head athwart a gigantic body.

Simon Schama

#16. There are some places where history just grabs you by the jugular. This is one of them.

Simon Schama

#17. Charlie Hebdo: Satire was the father of true political freedom, born in the 18th century; the scourge of bigots and tyrants. Sing its praises.

Simon Schama

#18. The next worse thing to a battle lost is a battle won.

Simon Schama

#19. 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, for millennia, held the promise of cheating mortality.

Simon Schama

#20. I do not want to be misunderstood that you need a dose of persecution in order, really, to have a sense of your identity. Otherwise, you know, there would be no American Jews. Even if you're not strictly, fiercely Orthodox, you commit yourselves to a community of memory.

Simon Schama

#21. Jews have never, ever, ever wished to be separate, unless they were forced to be.

Simon Schama

#22. It is already apparent that the 'minimalist' view of the Bible as wholly fictitious and unhooked from historical reality, may be as much of a mistake as the biblical literalism it sought to supersede.

Simon Schama

#23. 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 instruction but pleasure.

Simon Schama

#24. 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 religion can go on, when all the markers of power and trappings of monarchy disappear, ultimately serves the endurance of Judaism very well.

Simon Schama

#25. Almost everywhere else in Europe, the more military the state, the stronger the king - except in Britain. Here it was parliament, not the monarchy, who signed the cheques. The longer the war went on, the stronger parliament became, as the purse on which it sat grew bigger and bigger.

Simon Schama

#26. In the Einstein way, I can't believe in a universe that doesn't have some sort of prime mover, identical with all of created nature. I have a whole lot of a harder time with supposing the fine print of the Torah was a direct revelation.

Simon Schama

#27. The Elephantine papyri - written as some of the books of the Bible are being written - is true social and legal documentation, and to historians overwhelmingly powerful and moving, even when ostensibly about trivial things.

Simon Schama

#28. Somehow, the words don't have any vitality, any life to them, unless I can feel it marking on a paper. That's how I start. Once I'm off, then I switch to the laptop. I think it would all just be prose if it started on a laptop - not that what I do is poetry.

Simon Schama

#29. I would passionately make the case that the harder the times, the more we need things that aren't just about keeping our job and making a buck - important though those things are. Arts programming isn't some sort of add-on or ornamental luxury.

Simon Schama

#30. I am somebody who has never been able to give up '60s habits. I am the inevitable old codger on the dance floor.

Simon Schama

#31. Even for the most excitable preacher, there was nothing inherently sinful about a waffle.

Simon Schama

#32. 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 costume drama out of it. There's no place for it to go except trapped inside its little book.

Simon Schama

#33. It's not right to think about all of Jewish-German history as shrouded by the smoke of the crematorium.

Simon Schama

#34. As a schoolboy, poetry seemed defined by preciousness. It was all very rarefied.

Simon Schama

#35. St. Paul was making it impossible to be Jewish and Christian at the same time. What is very striking about those early churches and communities is that you could be both. Under Paul, though, you absolutely couldn't.

Simon Schama

#36. History gives you insight of the same quality of truth as poetry or philosophy or a novel.

Simon Schama

#37. 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 our lives. People want to be connected.

Simon Schama

#38. I am strongly of the opinion that chronology is very important. The great arc of time is what children are wired for.

Simon Schama

#39. 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 on into the future ...

Simon Schama

#40. 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 your reality.

Simon Schama

#41. 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 the school record at Haberdashers for consecutive detentions for simply speaking out of turn.

Simon Schama

#42. Jewish history has been in my cultural DNA since I was a child growing up in post-war London. In the midst of that dark, gray, lamenting monochromatic world of the '50s, I had a sense that both Jewish and English history were full of color and light and animation.

Simon Schama

#43. 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 on the other. But those are very exaggerated scenarios.

Simon Schama

#44. I understood when I was quite small that there were two special things about the Jews. That we'd endured for over 3,000 years despite everything that had been thrown at us, and that we had an extraordinarily dramatic story to tell.

Simon Schama

#45. The Jewish story is the story of wandering. It is the story of extraordinary heterogeneous complication.

Simon Schama

#46. 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 to life as if the reader was in their presence.

Simon Schama

#47. 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 politically gauche, but with some hint of promise.

Simon Schama

#48. An ox carcass by Rembrandt seems so utterly butchered as to be agonisingly still alive. A

Simon Schama

#49. The way history is currently taught in schools, jumping from Hitler to the Henrys, is like a nightmare vision of Star Wars, where you have episode four before you have episode one. The sense of going on a journey of chronology and continuity, is incredibly important to the imagination.

Simon Schama

#50. 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 the next job.

Simon Schama

#51. Nations don't start out. There is not a particular moment when they unveil the essence of themselves. They are always a work in progress.

Simon Schama

#52. 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 of time and climate, whether over an hour or a decade.

Simon Schama

#53. 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 or eight-year-old takes the highest quality of your powers.

Simon Schama

#54. The older I get, the more I want to do. It beats death, decay or golf in unfortunate trousers. Peace and quiet depress me.

Simon Schama

#55. Silence, this will surprise you not, isn't really a Jewish concept.

Simon Schama

#56. The default mode of modern writing about art is to despise any notion of singularity as so much overheated genius-fetishism.

Simon Schama

#57. The novelist's obligation to remake the sensuous texture of a vanished world is also the historian's. The strongest fiction writers often do deep research to make the thought and utterances of lost time credible.

Simon Schama

#58. Passover takes place in the home rather than the synagogue and centers around an epic meal - the seder - so you remember Passover as storytelling, you remember it in food, and you remember it in the family.

Simon Schama

#59. 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 and selling fish and chips, they were kind of debt enforcers.

Simon Schama

#60. 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 the door of honest narrative.

Simon Schama

#61. Jewish comedy doesn't come out of nothing. Jewish music doesn't come out of nothing ... I don't want to be part of a story where Jews are just victims or bullies - and I'm not saying that's what the Israelis are.

Simon Schama

#62. 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 a successor to Oliver Cromwell.

Simon Schama

#63. 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 was all very E. J. Thribb of me.

Simon Schama

#64. Jewish history turns out not to be an either/or story - as in, either pure Judaism detached from its surroundings or else assimilation - but rather, for the vast majority, the adventure of living in between.

Simon Schama

#65. Be angry only for a grave cause that rightly calls for indignation,' Maimonides wrote in his Mishneh Torah. What

Simon Schama

#66. I felt New York was a big, more stylish, more metropolitan Golders Green. I was thrilled.

Simon Schama

#67. 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 given them the power to challenge constituted authority. Bloodshed was not the unfortunate by product of revolution, it was the source of energy.

Simon Schama

#68. 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, too.

Simon Schama

#69. The Jews invented a portable religion in the shape of the Bible, the Torah, and eventually the Talmud, and with other portable forms of writing. So it's now possible to carry the religion, that is embedded in that writing, away from the ruins of political and military power.

Simon Schama

#70. The Bible, for all its riches, is not a document of social history.

Simon Schama

#71. The shadows of woman and child lie heavily athwart our own fears and nightmares and the two become translated, in the empty, indifferent place, from the local to the monumental. They are nobodies and thus become everybody.

Simon Schama

#72. A generation without history is a generation that not only loses a nation's memory but loses a sense of what it's like to be inside a human skin.

Simon Schama

#73. There is always a danger that those who are less obviously and traditionally important, prominent, or powerful will be left out of the history of human experience.

Chloe Schama

#74. Never crowd a pan with too many mushrooms. They give off an enormous amount of moisture. And there's nothing worse than a braised mushroom, other than a lot of braised mushrooms.

Simon Schama

#75. The notion that religion can actually be something ... attached to progressivism seems so bizarre. But all you have to say is that Abolition wouldn't have happened without it. The way in which African Americans managed to achieve a degree of self-determination was through the church.

Simon Schama

#76. America is truly special because it's founded on an idea. It's the ideological and philosophical equivalent of a formless God, in other words, you know? It's, again, the only great country in the world that it is formed out of words.

Simon Schama

#77. In the early nineteenth century, with Enlightenment optimism soured by years of war and revolution, critics were skeptical of America's naive faith that it had reinvented politics.

Simon Schama

#78. 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, I certainly will go.

Simon Schama

#79. Charles was constitutionally incapable of being a constitutional monarch.

Simon Schama

#80. In America, much foreign policy seems contrived to be an exercise in political theory with no attention to history whatsoever. Yet there's a great reverence for history - though it's history as thumb-sucking, security blanket-nibbling self-congratulation.

Simon Schama