Top 61 Quotes by Simon Schama

Sculptures created from found materials like ice and thorns, driftwood, and even bleached kangaroo bones all presuppose that artistic design will yield to the cycles of time and climate, whether over an hour or a decade.

The difficulty with poetry is that it doesn't have the life that Shakespeare or Jane Austen have beyond the page. You can't make a costume drama out of it. There's no place for it to go except trapped inside its little book.

The notion that religion can actually be something... attached to progressivism seems so bizarre. But all you have to say is that Abolition wouldn't have happened without it. The way in which African Americans managed to achieve a degree of self-determination was through the church.

I understood when I was quite small that there were two special things about the Jews. That we'd endured for over 3,000 years despite everything that had been thrown at us, and that we had an extraordinarily dramatic story to tell.

Growing up in Britain as a rather loose Jew, the two things that didn't belong together were freedom and religious intensity. In America, they do. The Founding Fathers made a bet that if you didn't force everyone to profess religion in their own particular way, you could protect intellectual freedom, and religion would flourish.

The Jews invented a portable religion in the shape of the Bible, the Torah, and eventually the Talmud, and with other portable forms of writing. So it's now possible to carry the religion, that is embedded in that writing, away from the ruins of political and military power.

In Mesopotamia or Egypt, for example, the monarch had a god-like religious status. But this is not the case in Judaism. So that notion that religion can go on, when all the markers of power and trappings of monarchy disappear, ultimately serves the endurance of Judaism very well.