Simon Schama Quotes About History

Quotes about: History

• 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

  Illumination, History, Narrators

  Simon Schama (2000). “A History of Britain: At the edge of the world? 3000 BC-AD 1603”, Miramax

• 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

• 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

  Memories, Patriotic, Loss

  Simon Schama (2000). “A History of Britain: At the edge of the world? 3000 BC-AD 1603”, Miramax

• 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

  Party, Army, Men

• Charles was constitutionally incapable of being a constitutional monarch.

  Simon Schama

  History, British History, Incapable

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

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

  Simon Schama

  War, History, Civil War

• From the days of the Founding Fathers, right to this (2008) election, how and where America fights to defend its freedom, has been the ultimate question in its politics. The one that triggers rage and sorrow; the one that asks is the price of blood too dear? Or, if it is to stay true to its convictions, does America have no coice but to put its lives on the line?

  Simon Schama

  Father, War, Fighting

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