Quotes by Simon Schama

About Simon Schama:

Simon Michael Schama is an English historian specialising in art history, Dutch history, and French history. He is a University Professor of History and Art History at Columbia University, New York. He first came to popular public attention with his history of the French Revolution titled Citizens, published in 1989. In the United Kingdom, he is perhaps best known for writing and hosting the 15-part BBC television documentary series A History of Britain broadcast between 2000 and 2002.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Simon Schama

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

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

Simon Schama

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

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

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...

Simon Schama

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

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...

Simon Schama

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

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

Growing up in Britain as a rather loose Jew, the two things that didn't belong together were freedom and religious intensity. In America, they do. The Founding Fathers made a bet that if you didn't force everyone to profess religion in their own part...

Simon Schama

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

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

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

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

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

Simon Schama

I find it very hard to write about Jewish history.

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 ...

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

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

Simon 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 ...

Simon Schama

Author Bio

  • NameSimon Schama
  • DescriptionBritish historian
  • BornFebruary 13, 1945
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionArt Historian; Historian
  • AwardsCommander Of The Order Of The British Empire