I would passionately make the case that the harder the times, the more we need things that aren’t just about keeping our job and making a buck – important though those things are. Arts programming isn’t some sort of add-on or ornamental luxury. Simon Schama Read Quote
I do not want to be misunderstood that you need a dose of persecution in order, really, to have a sense of your identity. Otherwise, you know, there would be no American Jews. Even if you’re not strictly, fiercely Orthodox, you commit yourselves to a community of memory. Simon Schama Read Quote
If someone asks me to go to speak at, say, Princeton, I might or might not go. But if someone asks me from Norman, Oklahoma, I certainly will go. Simon Schama Read Quote
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. Simon Schama Read Quote
I felt New York was a big, more stylish, more metropolitan Golders Green. I was thrilled. Simon Schama Read Quote
Somehow, the words don’t have any vitality, any life to them, unless I can feel it marking on a paper. That’s how I start. Once I’m off, then I switch to the laptop. I think it would all just be prose if it started on a laptop – not that what I do is poetry. Simon Schama Read Quote
History is admirably dangerous. It is not the soft option. Teachers need to be grown up and brave. Sensitivity is fine, but it stops at the door of honest narrative. Simon Schama Read Quote
In the Einstein way, I can’t believe in a universe that doesn’t have some sort of prime mover, identical with all of created nature. I have a whole lot of a harder time with supposing the fine print of the Torah was a direct revelation. Simon Schama Read Quote
I am somebody who has never been able to give up ’60s habits. I am the inevitable old codger on the dance floor. Simon Schama Read Quote
