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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, Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations

“Even for the most excitable preacher, there was nothing inherently sinful about a waffle.”
― Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age

“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

“The digital communications technology that was once imagined as a universe of transparent and perpetual illumination, in which cancerous falsehoods would perish beneath a saturation bombardment of irradiating data, has instead generated a much murkier and verification-free habitat where a google-generated search will deliver an electronic page on which links to lies and lunacy appear in identical format as those to truths and sanity. But why should we ever have assumed that technology and reason would be mutually self-reinforcing? The quickest visit to say, a site called Stormfront will persuade you that the demonic is in fact the best customer of the electronic.”
― Simon Schama, Scribble, Scribble, Scribble: Writings on Ice Cream, Obama, Churchill & My Mother

“The next worse thing to a battle lost is a battle won.”
― Simon Schama

“Historians like a quiet life, and usually they get it. For the most part, history moves at a deliberate pace, working its changes subtly and incrementally. Nations and their institutions harden into shape or crumble away like sediment carried by the flow of a sluggish river. English history in particular seems the work of a temperate community, seldom shaken by convulsions. But there are moments when history is unsubtle; when change arrives in a violent rush, decisive, bloody, traumatic; as a truck-load of trouble, wiping out everything that gives a culture its bearings - custom, language, law, loyalty. 1066 was one of those moments.”
― Simon Schama, A History of Britain: At the Edge of the World? 3500 BC-AD 1603

“Asked what he thought was the significance of the French Revolution, the Chinese Premier Zhou En-lai is reported to have answered, “It’s too soon to tell.”
― Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of The French Revolution

“It is already apparent that the ‘minimalistâ€� view of the Bible as wholly fictitious and unhooked from historical reality, may be as much of a mistake as the biblical literalism it sought to supersede.”
― Simon Schama, The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words, 1000 BC - 1492 AD

“The retaining membrane that held Dutch culture together for more than a century was a marvel of elasticity. Responding to appropriate external stimuli, it could expand or contract as the conditions of its survival altered. Under pressure, it could tighten to compress the Dutch into a sense of their indissoluble unity. In more expansive times it could relax and swell, allowing for internal differentiation and the absorption of a whole gamut of beliefs, faiths and even tongues. An omniscient kind of social filter swallowed up those foreign bodies and spat them out again as burghers: civically salubrious and residentially reliable.”
― Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age

“The Torah, then, was compact, transferable history, law, wisdom, poetic chant, prophecy, consolation and self-strengthening counsel. Just as the sanctuary could be erected in safety and dismantled in crisis, the speaking scroll was designed to survive even incineration, because the scribes who had composed and edited it had memorised its oral traditions and its texts as part of their basic education.”
― Simon Schama, The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words, 1000 BC - 1492 AD

“The wearing of skullcaps in public was criminalised, as were other items defined as habitually Jewish. But Hasidic Jews responded by adopting the costume of the Polish-Russian merchant; the black fox-fur shtreimel hat worn over the yarmulka, the long belted black coat and white stockings that merchants wore in St Petersburg. This is what they still wear in Jerusalem and elsewhere, imagined as distinctively Jewish dress, which frozen over the generations it has duly become.”
― Simon Schama, The Story of the Jews: When Words Fail, 1492â€�1900

“A central fact, possibly the central fact, about the Hebrew Bible is that it is not written at a moment of apogee, but over three centuries (eight to fifth) of trouble, That is what gives the Book its cumulative sobriety, its cautionary poetic, severity from the coarseness of triumphal self-congratulation found in imperial cultures.”
― Simon Schama, The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words, 1000 BCE â€� 1492 CE

“The first century of the plague had seen the country turned upside down. In the twilight years of Edward III it seemed that nothing could damage the greatness of the Plantagenet royal estate. But the world of the village went from impoverished claustrophobia to traumatized infection. A hundred years later, everything had been upended, courtesy of King Death.”
― Simon Schama, History of Britain: Volume 1, A

“American cause at Concord, Bunker Hill, Rhode Island and finally at Yorktown (where they were put in the front line—whether as a tribute to their courage or as expendable sacrifices is not clear). At the battle of Monmouth in New Jersey black troops on both sides fought each other. But until the British aggressively recruited slaves in 1775 and 1776, state assemblies, even in the North, as well as the multi-state Continental Congress, flinched from their enlistment.”
― Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: The Slaves, the British, and the American Revolution

“The second Lateran Council of 1139 had attempted, optimistically, to ban the use of the crossbow by Christians against fellow Christians. But no warlord worth his salt was going to do without them, so Jewish crossbowmen were trained as a special corps for the king, and became famous for specialising in the weapon throughout the kingdom.”
― Simon Schama, The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words, 1000 BC - 1492 AD

“He believed—and the judgement of most modern historians, such as Benjamin Quarles, Gary Nash, Sylvia Frey, Ellen Gibson Wilson and James Walker concurs—that at least thirty thousand had escaped from Virginia plantations in attempts to reach the British lines.”
― Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: The Slaves, the British, and the American Revolution

“question, albeit speculative, won’t go away. No scholar quarrels with the archaic antiquity of the earliest elements of the Hebrew Bible: the Song of the Sea and of Moses. A strong consensus exists that their form is consistent with other similar archaic ‘songâ€� literature from the late Bronze Age Near East of the twelfth century BCE. If that’s correct, even though the Song of the Sea has much in common with the Phoenician epic of the storm god Baal’s conquest of the sea, why would early Israelite poets have created, perhaps just a century after the purported event, their own identity-epic, in which the degrading element of enslavement and liberation is entirely distinct from other archetypes, if there was nothing to it lodged in the folk memory? The most sceptical view presupposes an indigenous subset of Canaanites, settled in the Judaean hills, differentiating themselves from the rest of Canaanite tribes and states, through a mythic history of separation, migration and conquest, all with exceptionally detailed topography. Why that story?”
― Simon Schama, The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words, 1000 BC - 1492 AD

“Judaic monotheism had deeply penetrated Arabia for almost a century before Muhammad declared his revelation in 610 in one of the towns â€� Makka, or Mecca â€� in which those Himyarite emigrants had settled. It was precisely because Arabian monotheism (as distinct from the confusing three-in-one version preached by Christianity) had such a strongly Judaic colouring â€� was in effect Arab Judaism â€� that Muhammad, who had lived among Jews all his life, could assume at the very least a sympathetic hearing among them, even that they might be the most receptive of the population to his prophecy, not least the part about Islam being the true Abrahamic faith.”
― Simon Schama, The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words, 1000 BC - 1492 AD

“as their deliverer, to the point where they were ready to risk life and limb to reach the lines of the royal army. To”
― Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: The Slaves, the British, and the American Revolution

“. . .for the designated successor to royal authority, the Sovereign People, was no more capable than Louis XVI of reconciling freedom with power.”
― Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution

“No, no, no, choose life, More Marimondes thought. It wasn't that he disrespected the sacrifice of the martyr, but the simplicity of absolute ideals, across all religions, he found alien and disrespectful of the injunction to save life clearly enjoined in the Torah.”
― Simon Schama, The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words, 1000 BCE â€� 1492 CE

“she had reached in her reading of Scott’s novel been chosen by Victoria as a literary valediction”
― Simon Schama, A History of Britain - Volume 3: The Fate of Empire 1776-2000

“An ox carcass by Rembrandt seems so utterly butchered as to be agonisingly still alive. A”
― Simon Schama, Hang-Ups: Essays on Art

“than the republican, road that seemed to offer a surer chance of liberty. Although the history that unfolded from the entanglement between black desperation and British paternalism would often prove to be bitterly tragic, it was, nonetheless, a formative moment in the history of African-American freedom.”
― Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: The Slaves, the British, and the American Revolution

“During the few weeks in the spring of 1781, when Lord Cornwallis’s troops were not far from his home, Monticello, Thomas Jefferson, who had seen his own attempt to incorporate a paragraph attacking slavery in the Declaration of Independence stricken out by Congress, lost thirty of his own.”
― Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: The Slaves, the British, and the American Revolution

“God is the finger; God is writing; God, is above all else, words.”
― Simon Schama, The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words, 1000 BCE â€� 1492 CE

“sentinel”
― Simon Schama, The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words, 1000 BC - 1492 AD

“The shadows of woman and child lie heavily athwart our own fears and nightmares and the two become translated, in the empty, indifferent place, from the local to the monumental. They are nobodies and thus become everybody.”
― Simon Schama, Hang-Ups: Essays on Art

“As far as Matthew Arnold was concerned, Hellenes and Hebrews were oil and water.1 Both were ‘augustâ€� and, in their respective ways, ‘admirableâ€�, but they didn’t mix. Greeks pursued self-realisation; Jews struggled at self-conquest. ‘Be obedientâ€� was the sovereign command of Judaism; ‘be true to your natureâ€� was what mattered to the Hellene.”
― Simon Schama, The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words, 1000 BC - 1492 AD

“Be angry only for a grave cause that rightly calls for indignation,â€� Maimonides wrote in his Mishneh Torah. What”
― Simon Schama, The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words, 1000 BC - 1492 AD