Simon Schama Quotes

United Kingdom, Historian
February 13, 1945

Sir Simon Michael Schama, CBE, FRSL, FBA 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.

America is truly special because it's founded on an idea. It's the ideological and philosophical equivalent of a formless God, in other words, you know? It's, again, the only great country in the world that it is formed out of words.

Simon Schama
- America
- Words
- Idea
The Jewish story is the story of wandering. It is the story of extraordinary heterogeneous complication.

Simon Schama

We seem wired to grieve with greenery. Allowing the dead to dissolve into the earth, to become part of the cycle of the seasons, has, for millennia, held the promise of cheating mortality.

Simon Schama
- Dead
- Cycle
- Greenery
Jews have never, ever, ever wished to be separate, unless they were forced to be.

Simon Schama
- Never
- Jews
- Separate
I am strongly of the opinion that chronology is very important. The great arc of time is what children are wired for.

Simon Schama
Jews can live their own life as Jews and yet be part of a different country.

Simon Schama
- Life
- Country
- Part
The Bible, for all its riches, is not a document of social history.

Simon Schama
- History
- Bible
- Document
I find it very hard to write about Jewish history.

Simon Schama
- Write
- Hard
- Jewish

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

Simon Schama
- Truth
- History
- Quality
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
- History
- Space
- Connected