Simon Schama Quotes

Quotes about:

Civil War History War

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

Art, Reality, Order

47 Copy quote
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

Sorting Out, Stories, Truthful

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Landscapes are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock. It is... difficult to think of a single natural system that has not, for better or worse, been substantially modified by human culture. The cultural habits of humanity have always made room for the sacredness of nature.

Simon Schama

Funny, Animal, Thinking

"Preview", www.theguardian.com. May 26, 2007.

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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

Forever, Shadow, Inability

"Dead Certainties". Book by Simon Schama, p. 320, 1991.

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

Simon Schama

Waffles, Preacher

Simon Schama (1988). “The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age”, p.189, Univ of California Press

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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

Challenges, Violence, Revolution

Simon Schama (2004). “Citizens: A Chronicle of The French Revolution”, p.728, Penguin UK

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What can art really do in the face of atrocity?

Simon Schama

Art, Atrocities, Faces

"REVIEW / Actors, soundtrack clutter bite-size bits of art appreciation" by Kenneth Baker, www.sfgate.com. June 18, 2007.

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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

Essence, Progress, Moments

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Irreverence is the lifeblood of freedom.

Simon Schama

Irreverence

"Charlie Hebdo shooting: police release names and photos of two brothers wanted for the attack - as it happened" by Ben Doherty, Helen Davidson, www.theguardian.com. January 8, 2015.

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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

Father, Tyrants, Charlie Hebdo

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

Simon Schama

War, History, Civil War

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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

Depressing, Golf, Decay

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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

Stars, War, School

"This much I know". Interview with Geraldine Bedell, www.theguardian.com. October 15, 2005.

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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

War, Fate, Animal

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

Simon Schama

Past, History, Greek

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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

Adventure, Majority, Stories

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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

History, England, Thrones

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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

Thinking, Space, People

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

Simon Schama

New York, Green, Bigs

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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.

Simon Schama

Hate, Autumn, Winter

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

Simon Schama

War, Gone, Violence

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

Simon Schama

Battle, Next, Lost

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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

Kings, Military, War

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Taxation, the very thing that had triggered the British civil wars, would do so again, this time in America. The taxes may have been different, but the result would once again be disaster. What happened in America was really round two of those wars - the civil war of the British Empire, with the Hanoverians playing the part of the Stuarts, and the Americans the heirs of the revolutionaries, of Cromwell and of William III, the inheritors of a true British liberty, that had somehow got lost in its own motherland.

Simon Schama

War, Two, America

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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

Love You, First Love, Magic

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Born: February 13, 1945
Occupation: Art Historian
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