Schama History Quotes & Sayings

The Bible, for all its riches, is not a document of social history. — Simon Schama

Historians like a quiet life, and usually they get it. For the most part, history moves at a deliberate pace, working its changes subtly and incrementally. Nations and their institutions harden into shape or crumble away like sediment carried by the flow of a sluggish river. English history in particular seems the work of a temperate community, seldom shaken by convulsions. But there are moments when history is unsubtle; when change arrives in a violent rush, decisive, bloody, traumatic; as a truck-load of trouble, wiping out everything that gives a culture its bearings - custom, language, law, loyalty. 1066 was one of those moments. — Simon Schama

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

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

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. It's not a democracy, but it's not a tyranny. It's not like the rest of the world, the rest of Europe. There is a parliament, laws have to be made, elections are made. — Simon Schama

Thoughts are the gun, words are the bullets, deeds are the target, the bulls-eye is heaven. — Douglas Horton

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

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

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

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

Charles was constitutionally incapable of being a constitutional monarch. — Simon Schama

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

History gives you insight of the same quality of truth as poetry or philosophy or a novel. — Simon Schama

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

Even for the most excitable preacher, there was nothing inherently sinful about a waffle. — Simon Schama

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

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 it does no more than recycle patriotic pieties unsuited to a global marketplace, would be an act of appallingly self-inflicted collective memory loss. — Simon Schama

I want someone honest, someone who's very sweet to my family and friends, and polite to the other people around me. — Selena Gomez

Working hard to earn more money and then giving it away in higher taxes isn't financially intelligent, even if you do put some of it into a retirement account. — Robert Kiyosaki

I find it very hard to write about Jewish history. — Simon Schama

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

If you ask religious believers why they believe, you may find a few "sophisticated" theologians who will talk about God as the "Ground of all Isness," or as "a metaphor for interpersonal fellowship" or some such evasion. But the majority of believers leap, more honestly and vulnerably, to a version of the argument from design or the argument from first cause. Philosophers of the caliber of David Hume didn't need to rise from their armchairs to demonstrate the fatal weakness of all such argument: they beg the question of the Creator's origin. — Lawrence M. Krauss

There are some places where history just grabs you by the jugular. This is one of them. — Simon Schama

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

What are you doing a study on right now?"
"A study on the statistical probablity of love at first sight. — Jennifer E. Smith

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

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

The history of the Jews has been written overwhelmingly by scholars of texts - understandably given the formative nature of the Bible and the Talmud. Seeing Jewish history through artifacts, architecture and images is still a young but spectacularly flourishing discipline that's changing the whole story. — Simon Schama

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