Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Irreverence is the lifeblood of freedom.
What can art really do in the face of atrocity?
I find it very hard to write about Jewish history.
The next worse thing to a battle lost is a battle won.
I first read War And Peace about 100 years after Tolstoy wrote it.
The Bible, for all its riches, is not a document of social history.
Silence, this will surprise you not, isn't really a Jewish concept.
Charles was constitutionally incapable of being a constitutional monarch.
Jews can live their own life as Jews and yet be part of a different country.
As a schoolboy, poetry seemed defined by preciousness. It was all very rarefied.
Jews have never, ever, ever wished to be separate, unless they were forced to be.
There are some places where history just grabs you by the jugular. This is one of them.
Even for the most excitable preacher, there was nothing inherently sinful about a waffle.
I felt New York was a big, more stylish, more metropolitan Golders Green. I was thrilled.
History gives you insight of the same quality of truth as poetry or philosophy or a novel.
But it struck me that the extreme violence and cruelty of the English Civil War had gone understated.
It's not right to think about all of Jewish-German history as shrouded by the smoke of the crematorium.
The Jewish story is the story of wandering. It is the story of extraordinary heterogeneous complication.
DIY, cricket, automobile repair. I could study it for a lifetime and not produce a word on the carburettor.
From the very beginning, history wasn't content simply to be nostalgic fairytales; it wanted to make you think.
I am somebody who has never been able to give up '60s habits. I am the inevitable old codger on the dance floor.
I am strongly of the opinion that chronology is very important. The great arc of time is what children are wired for.
I don't really like the autumn. For me it is the beginning of winter and I hate the winter. White, the colour of death.
The older I get, the more I want to do. It beats death, decay or golf in unfortunate trousers. Peace and quiet depress me.
The default mode of modern writing about art is to despise any notion of singularity as so much overheated genius-fetishism.
Walking on camera is damn hard. It's a Jewish problem. The rangy stride across the blasted moor is not really a Jewish thing.
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 not very relaxed about bad reviews. But I am resilient. I grieve, curse and swear, put on loud music, and get on with the next job.
Nations don't start out. There is not a particular moment when they unveil the essence of themselves. They are always a work in progress.
Charlie Hebdo: Satire was the father of true political freedom, born in the 18th century; the scourge of bigots and tyrants. Sing its praises.
A generation without history is a generation that not only loses a nation's memory but loses a sense of what it's like to be inside a human skin.
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.
In its Greek origins, historia meant inquiry, and from Thucydides onwards, the past has been studied to understand its connections with the present.
My mother was an awful cook, an exceptionally awful kosher cook, but I stayed kosher until I got to college, even though I'd long stopped believing in God.
I wrote a staggeringly bad poem when I was 19 after a girlfriend dumped me. I seem to remember comparing her to a tarantula. It was all very E. J. Thribb of me.
The synagogues of late antiquity and the early medieval period were built around imagery: imagery of remembering the Temple, but also of the celestial zodiac, too.
Great art has dreadful manners. The greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure, and then proceed in short order to re-arrange your reality.
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.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the stereotype of the ugly American - voracious, preachy, mercenary, and bombastically chauvinist - was firmly in place in Europe.
The irony about Charles II is not that he came to the throne because England needed a successor to Charles I, but because England needed a successor to Oliver Cromwell.
I actually think that history has fed off the restlessness of cyber space, of kind of the frantic, segmented nature of the way we lead our lives. People want to be connected.
Never crowd a pan with too many mushrooms. They give off an enormous amount of moisture. And there's nothing worse than a braised mushroom, other than a lot of braised mushrooms.
I used to have a monthly cookery column, and am a big cook, so that whole sense of connecting what one does with food to one's cultural identity has always been fascinating to me.
In the early nineteenth century, with Enlightenment optimism soured by years of war and revolution, critics were skeptical of America's naive faith that it had reinvented politics.
We seem wired to grieve with greenery. Allowing the dead to dissolve into the earth, to become part of the cycle of the seasons, has, for millennia, held the promise of cheating mortality.
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.
Histories never conclude; they just pause their prose. Their stories are, if they are truthful, untidy affairs, resistant to windings-up and sortings-out. They beat raggedly on into the future.
In the end, history, especially British history with its succession of thrilling illuminations, should be, as all her most accomplished narrators have promised, not just instruction but pleasure.
Passover takes place in the home rather than the synagogue and centers around an epic meal - the seder - so you remember Passover as storytelling, you remember it in food, and you remember it in the family.
At 11, 12 I thought I was clumsy, ugly, a mess, an unappealing person, but I did have the gift of the gab. I had the school record at Haberdashers for consecutive detentions for simply speaking out of turn.