The challenge for a nonfiction writer is to achieve a poetic precision using the documents of truth but somehow to make people and places spring to life as if the reader was in their presence.
Simon SchamaRead
Jews can live their own life as Jews and yet be part of a different country.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the possibility of maintaining one's cultural identity while being a part of a larger national identity.
Simon Schama's quote reflects on the Jewish experience of living authentically within their cultural traditions while also participating in the broader society of the country they reside in. It highlights the idea that one can embrace their identity fully without the need to forsake their homeland or cultural heritage, suggesting a harmonious coexistence of multiple identities.
Themes
JewsIdentityCultureBelongingNationality
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about multiculturalism, one might use this quote to illustrate the importance of cultural diversity.
More from Simon Schama
All quotes βIn its Greek origins, historia meant inquiry, and from Thucydides onwards, the past has been studied to understand its connections with the present.
Simon SchamaRead
Jewish history turns out not to be an either/or story - as in, either pure Judaism detached from its surroundings or else assimilation - but rather, for the vast majority, the adventure of living in between.
Simon SchamaRead
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.
Simon SchamaRead
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 SchamaRead
History gives you insight of the same quality of truth as poetry or philosophy or a novel.
Simon SchamaRead
Similar quotes
There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.
Audre LordeRead
Of all the statist violations of individual rights in a mixed economy, the military draft is the worst. It is an abrogation of rights. It negates manβs fundamental right-the right to life-and establishes the fundamental principle of statism: that a manβs life belongs to the state, and the state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it in battle. Once that principle is accepted, the rest is only a matter of time.
Ayn RandRead
You have forgotten the One who doesn't care about ownership, who doesn't try to turn a profit from every human exchange.
RumiRead
Night thoughts have a different color than day thoughts, a different slant, more than anything else they know all the secret paths and chinks in the armor they can take advantage of to force their way into consciousness.
Christa WolfRead
Legal ethics is a misnomer ... lawyers conducting themselves legally are not necessarily conducting themselves morally ."...and ..."The zero sum nature of the legal system, combined with the universal adoption of zealotry as the marching orders of practioners and prosecutors, transforms the moral mission of the legal system from one of truth-seeking, storytelling, and justice, to one of fabrication, distortion, and manipulation in pursuit of victory. These victories, however, make us all losers.
Thane RosenbaumRead
Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.
Gilbert K. ChestertonRead