“This is where Rembrandt would have come; to the chamber of insolvency. Passing through this door with its frees of worthless stock certificates, rats scuttling through empty money chests of the profligate debtor. You just can’t beat the Dutch for wagging their finger at your wicked ways.”
– Simon Schama
“History’s element of discovery is time.”
– Simon Schama
“We mustn’t make history feel like granny’s attic.”
– Simon Schama
“History has been sucked into a black-hole called social-studies. I think that calls for the abolition of social-studies. This condition has reflected the reduction of history in school to commentaries on newspaper editorials. It’s really the old tradition of history being the instructional solution for a quandary of the weak.”
– Simon Schama
“History is an investigation into the nature of being human.”
– Simon Schama
“There is the perfectly correct instinct that in some way we remain very close to those who preceded us over centuries and generations, and in some ways we are also quite different and history dwells within this wonderfully delicate problematic area between kinship and remoteness. We need it because we need to rebel against the shortness of our own span of years. We need a kind of purchase on a length of time that will tell us about our humanity that it is longer than our own allotted three-score and ten – I think that’s very, very deep in human instinct.”
“It was the hand of God that decided the outcome of battles, the fate of nations, and the life or death of kings – everyone knew that.”
Knowledge Guild 