Simon Schama Quotes

Although I write to entertain, and try to keep my work free of didacticism, I do have a rather passionate belief in our need to be connected to - and to learn from - history.

No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.

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.

Legends are all to do with the past and nothing to do with the present.

One of the reasons for going back into the past is that it's almost the only place that there's any drama.

Those who try to obliterate the past are injuring the present.

To communicate the truths of history is an act of hope for the future.

But we cannot rely on memorials and museums alone. We can tell ourselves we will never forget and we likely won't. But we need to make sure that we teach history to those who never had the opportunity to remember in the first place.

Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.

The concept of preserving history, collating full archives, making them as usable as possible so the public have access to them, I really feel that it allows the public an ability to engage with their own history.

I think people in general have neglected to learn about history.

The history of the past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present.

Most of us get our history through story.

We know the past and its great events, the present in its multitudinous complications, chiefly through faith in the testimony of others.

Trying to recreate for people the ways in which the past was similar to the present is an important part of what a historian has to do, and what a student of foreign policy has to do.

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

Today, we are fortunate that the historical novel has reached such extraordinary heights of technical mastery. The ability of society to connect with the past holds out the greatest hope for it being able to embrace the future.

I hope my journals relating to World War II will help clarify issues of the past and thereby contribute to understanding the issues and conditions of the present and future.

Everybody likes a bit of gossip to some point, as long as it's gossip with some point to it. That's why I like history. History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

There's no other way to learn about it, except through documentaries. I encourage documentarians to continue telling stories about World War II. I think documentaries are the greatest way to educate an entire generation that doesn't often look back to learn anything about the history that provided a safe haven for so many of us today. Documentaries are the first line of education, and the second line of education is dramatization, such as The Pacific.

It is hard to celebrate the past in an ecumenical way, or even in a fair-minded one, apparently. The trouble with the past is not just that it's behind us, it's that it is not even over yet.

Time is something that interests me a whole lot - past and present, and how the past appears as people change.

I just try to tell my stories in a way that is still light-hearted and fun to listen to. I'm not trying to bash you over the head with what I have to say.

Without understanding your history, you can't get a perspective about the present.

We have to learn from the past.