Simon Schama Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

Irreverence is the lifeblood of freedom.

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.

What can art really do in the face of atrocity?

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

But it struck me that the extreme violence and cruelty of the English Civil War had gone understated.

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.

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.

Walking on camera is damn hard. It's a Jewish problem. The rangy stride across the blasted moor is not really a Jewish thing.

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.

Charles was constitutionally incapable of being a constitutional monarch.

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

DIY, cricket, automobile repair. I could study it for a lifetime and not produce a word on the carburettor.

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.

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

In its Greek origins, historia meant inquiry, and from Thucydides onwards, the past has been studied to understand its connections with the present.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.