Simon Schama Quotes

History is the always incomplete and problematic reconstruction of what is no longer there

There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past.

History is only conjecture, and the best historians try to do it as accurately as they can. They try to accurately reassemble the facts and then put them down on paper.

Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.

If history starts as a guest list, it has a tendency to end like the memory of a drunken party: misheard, blurred, fragmentary.

Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly.

Indeed, we might all forget where we have been if we didn't have somebody to assemble and arrange the little blocks called facts from which history is constructed, artfully or less so.

It is like writing history with lightning and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.

Writers are the history keepers.

The Arabian genealogist, like his brother the Arabian historian, had a horror vacui and his fancy had no difficulty in bridging gaps and filling vacancies

In reconstructing the past, historians generally are compelled to rely on accounts written after the event by participants and witnesses, or on the hearsay versions of those who learned at second-hand what had occurred. Such writings are subject to the infirmities of recollection, or of bias arising from allegiance to one side or the other.

Modern historians are all would-be philosophers; who, instead of relating facts as they occurred, give us their version, or rather perversions of them, always colored by their political prejudices, or distorted to establish some theory ...

In these times when the practice of letters declines, no rather perishes in the cities of Gaul, there has been found no scholar trained in ordered composition to present in prose or verse a picture of things which have befallen.

The historian’s imperative has no teeth.

(Thomas Babington Macaulay's History of England was so full of errors of fact and interpretation that:) It is beyond our hopes to overtake Lord Macaulay.... We can only hope that Truth will follow swiftly enough to fasten the label "Liar" to his genteel coattails.

Whosoever, in writing a modern history, shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth.

Everybody rewrites history if he can.

They [Moslem historians] have made present-day India, and Hinduism even more so, out to be a zoo - an agglomeration of assorted, disparate specimens. No such thing as "India", just a geographical expression, just a construct of the British; no such thing as Hinduism, just a word used by Arabs to describe the assortment they encountered, just an invention of th, e communalists to impose a uniformity - that has been their stance. For this they have blackened the Hindu period of our history, and, as we shall see, strained to whitewash the Islamic period.

Historians desiring to write the actions of men, ought to set down the simple truth, and not say anything for love or hatred

To converse with historians is to keep good company…

In a certain sense all men are historians.

No serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist... Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so.

Do we really know what the past was, what actually happened, or is history “a fable” not quite “agreed upon”? Our knowledge of any past event is always incomplete, probably inaccurate, beclouded by ambivalent evidence and biased historians, and perhaps distorted by our own patriotic or religious partisanship. “Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.”

Historians are dangerous and capable of turning everything upside down. They have to be watched.

Creative memory is the historian's most subtle opponent.