Quotes from Simon Schama

Even for the most excitable preacher, there was nothing inherently sinful about a waffle.

I'm helplessly and permanently a Red Sox fan. It was like first love...You never forget. It's special. It's the first time I saw a ballpark. I'd thought nothing would ever replace cricket. Wow! Fenway Park at 7 o'clock in the evening. Oh, just, magic beyond magic: never got over that

The next worse thing to a battle lost is a battle won.

It is already apparent that the 'minimalist' view of the Bible as wholly fictitious and unhooked from historical reality, may be as much of a mistake as the biblical literalism it sought to supersede.

The wearing of skullcaps in public was criminalised, as were other items defined as habitually Jewish. But Hasidic Jews responded by adopting the costume of the Polish-Russian merchant; the black fox-fur shtreimel hat worn over the yarmulka, the long belted black coat and white stockings that merchants wore in St Petersburg. This is what they still wear in Jerusalem and elsewhere, imagined as distinctively Jewish dress, which frozen over the generations it has duly become.

The first century of the plague had seen the country turned upside down. In the twilight years of Edward III it seemed that nothing could damage the greatness of the Plantagenet royal estate. But the world of the village went from impoverished claustrophobia to traumatized infection. A hundred years later, everything had been upended, courtesy of King Death.

A central fact, possibly the central fact, about the Hebrew Bible is that it is not written at a moment of apogee, but over three centuries (eight to fifth) of trouble, That is what gives the Book its cumulative sobriety, its cautionary poetic, severity from the coarseness of triumphal self-congratulation found in imperial cultures.

Asked what he thought was the significance of the French Revolution, the Chinese Premier Zhou En-lai is reported to have answered, "It's too soon to tell.

The Torah, then, was compact, transferable history, law, wisdom, poetic chant, prophecy, consolation and self-strengthening counsel. Just as the sanctuary could be erected in safety and dismantled in crisis, the speaking scroll was designed to survive even incineration, because the scribes who had composed and edited it had memorised its oral traditions and its texts as part of their basic education.

No, no, no, choose life , More Marimondes thought. It wasn't that he disrespected the sacrifice of the martyr, but the simplicity of absolute ideals, across all religions, he found alien and disrespectful of the injunction to save life clearly enjoined in the Torah.

The shadows of woman and child lie heavily athwart our own fears and nightmares and the two become translated, in the empty, indifferent place, from the local to the monumental. They are nobodies and thus become everybody.

When imperial powers fray at the edges, ethnic groups perceived to be the beneficiaries of their trust suddenly start to look like aliens not natives, however long they may have been settled.

An ox carcass by Rembrandt seems so utterly butchered as to be agonisingly still alive. A

That the two religions were engaged in a contested Passover–Easter dialogue at this formative moment is not in doubt. Even after the Council of Nicaea in 325, with Constantine himself present, separated out the two holidays and made sure that should they fall on the same day it would be the Jews who moved their Passover, that combative dialogue continued.

Be angry only for a grave cause that rightly calls for indignation,' Maimonides wrote in his Mishneh Torah. What

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He was also deemed an irreproachable holy man who had returned to Antioch only when a life of self-mortification threatened to kill him should he persist with it. John had work to do: the most urgent task was to separate Christians from Jews, once and for all.

a young student had written to his father, justifying his decision to volunteer by declaring that "our liberty can only be assured if it will have for its bed a mattress of cadavers… I consent to become one of those cadavers.

The exodus from the flood valley of the Nile, the end of foreign enslavement, was presented by the Bible writers as the condition of becoming fully Israelite.

I would want the British reader to feel that religion in America isn't an absurd thing - a sign of a pin head athwart a gigantic body.

I am somebody who has never been able to give up '60s habits. I am the inevitable old codger on the dance floor.

The Elephantine papyri - written as some of the books of the Bible are being written - is true social and legal documentation, and to historians overwhelmingly powerful and moving, even when ostensibly about trivial things.

History gives you insight of the same quality of truth as poetry or philosophy or a novel.

The default mode of modern writing about art is to despise any notion of singularity as so much overheated genius-fetishism.