Best quotes by Simon Schama on History

Checkout quotes by Simon Schama on History

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

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

  - 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 find it very hard to write about Jewish history.

  - 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ 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