Simon Schama Quotes

I don't think you learn specific lessons from history, but you do learn proportion.

There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.

We learn from history. That's what it's all about.

I think you can learn from history.

History is clarified experience.

But history is neither watchmaking nor cabinet construction. It is an endeavor toward better understanding.

In analyzing history do not be too profound, for often the causes are quite superficial.

I like to think I'm a recovering historian.

History is the queen of the humanities. It teaches wisdom and humility, and it tells us how things change through time.

History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.

When I was a kid, I thought history was the most boring subject of all. I shouldn't blame my teachers; I should blame me, but I'll blame them.

History after all is the true poetry.

But every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

Most of us get our history through story.

It may be enough to study history in all its nuance and ambiguity for its own sake. But there is no country free of the need to find new ways of reading the past as an inspiring way of thinking about everything else, including the present.

While we read history we make history.

I don't think you should ever run from history. You should learn from it and embrace it.

I study history in order to give an interpretation.

Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter. This is what makes the trade of historian so attractive.

History is too serious to be left to historians.

History is not just a story related by a fool.

History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product.

Modern history is like a deaf person who is in the habit of answering questions that no one has put to them.