Simon Schama Quotes

When confronted with the facts of foreign atrocities, the experience is often consigned to the realm of the unimaginable. Fiction makes the unimaginable imaginable.

My mind revolts and my soul cannot support the weight of so much evil: theft, rape, pillage, deaths, and murders, fires and devastation; the virgin violated, the cry of the widow and the orphan; the father armed against his son and each one looking for his brother to kill him; of those who have migrated; of the thousands who have fled; of the bodies stretched out in the public streets; of the bones which cover the fields and of so much blood shed on Venezuela’s soil.

To look upon the massacre of our fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers, and if we speak we are called savages ….

What is happening in Nigeria is an absolute atrocity.

Human beings can do some God-awful things to other human beings

In rushed a Body of Hellhounds—not content with cutting him and stabbing him in several places, they drew a cord round his neck until his Tongue was forced out—It they cut off and three fingers of his right hand—Then they cut out his wife’s tongue and … with a case knife cut off her thumb and four of her fingers one after another. She I fear cannot recover. There was in the house a brother of hers about 14 years old … his tongue, those merciless Villains cut out and cut the calf of his leg with a sword.

Many writers who have had to deal with the subject of atrocity can't face it head-on.

To write is to give meaning to suffering.

Every single day, I wake up and take a glimpse of where I am now compared to where I was before, and the work that we have all put in to be in this space. I think of that, and being able to express myself through my art and show up and be present - that's activism, advocacy, and artistry in itself.

We need creativity. We need more poetry after Auschwitz.

We are the heirs of a past of rope, fire, and murder. I for one am not ashamed of this past. My shame is for those who became so inhuman that they could inflict this torture upon us.

And the general shot my sister. I could not look at her, but I remember the sound of when she hit the ground. I hear that sound when things hit the ground still. Anything.' If I could, I would make it so nothing ever hit the ground again.

They say that art comes from the soul. The more drama in an artist's life, the more he can draw on for his art. Van Gogh and Picasso had troubled souls, but poor Steve Kaufman has been shot once, stabbed 3 times - all by women. That is a lot of drama for great art.

I call it suffering and pain, they call it entertainment.

Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name!

This is what war does. Right here, in my hands. This is war.

A prizefighter who gets knocked out or is badly outclassed suffers in a way he will never forget.

The executioner's face is always well hidden.

Hard to believe that so nearby, just across the Channel, such atrocities could still occur in their supposedly civilized world, that one could wake up one morning and find oneself bereft of brothers, parents, friends, all with the slice of an ax.

My arms are up to the elbows in blood. That is the most terrible thing that lies in my soul.

That's one of the horrors of war, that you can train a person, train them to hate, train them to kill. It's a terrible thought.

Hell is out of fashion - institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the 20th century are more private affairs, the gaps between the bars are the sutures of one's own skull. A valid hell is one from which there is a possibility of redemption, even if this is never achieved, the dungeons of an architecture of grace whose spires point to some kind of heaven. The institutional hells of the present century are reached with one-way tickets, marked Nagasaki and Buchenwald, worlds of terminal horror even more final than the grave.

War is like a monster," he says, almost to himself. "War is the devil. It starts and it consumes and it grows and grows and grows." He's looking at me now. "And otherwise normal men become monsters, too.

There's a numbness in our culture to the continuing horrors of genocide.

Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms the future for more atrocity.