Simon Sebag-Montefiore famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

The greatest privilege of childhood is to live totally in the present.
-- Simon Sebag-Montefiore

#Childhood #Privilege
Stalin was formed by much more than a miserable childhood, just as the USSR was formed by much more than Marxist ideology.
-- Simon Sebag-Montefiore

#Childhood #Miserable #Marxist
The Bible became the book of books, but it is not one document. It is a mystical library of interwoven texts by unknown authors who wrote and edited at different times with widely divergent aims. This sacred work of so many epochs and so many hands contains some facts of provable history, some stories of unprovable myth, some poetry of soaring beauty, and many passages of unintelligible, perhaps coded, perhaps simply mistranslated, mystery. Most of it is written not to recount events but to promote a higher truthâ€”the relationship of one people and their God.
-- Simon Sebag-Montefiore

#Book #Hands #People
The Jews had a love-hate relationship with the Greek culture. They craved its civilization but resented its dominance. Josephus says they regarded Greeks as feckless, promiscuous, modernizing lightweights, yet many Jerusalemites were already living the fashionable lifestyle using Greek and Jewish names to show they could be both. Jewish conservatives disagreed; for them, the Greeks were simply idolaters.
-- Simon Sebag-Montefiore

#Hate #Civilization #Names
The language of these Soviet show trials... could only be understood in the Aesopian imagery of the closed Bolshevik universe of conspiracies of evil against good in which 'terrorism' simply signified 'any doubt about the policies or character of Stalin.' All his political opponents were per se assassins. More than two 'terrorists' was a 'conspiracy'.
-- Simon Sebag-Montefiore

#Character #Two #Evil

I had an amazing childhood.
From my childhood, obedience was something I could not get out of my system. When I entered the armed service at the age of twenty-seven, I found being obedient not a bit more difficult than it had been during my life to that point. It was unthinkable that I would not follow orders.
I take the most wrenchingly painful moments of my life, brush them off and present them for the amusement of others. Luckily for me, my childhood was torture.
I was born in Somerville, but I don't remember very much about it because we moved from there to Arlington when I was five years old, and it was in Arlington that I spent most of my childhood.
You can go through life and make new friends every year - every month practically - but there was never any substitute for those friendships of childhood that survive into adult years. Those are the ones in which we are bound to one another with hoops of steel.
Childhood is but change made gay and visible ...
Discovery is the privilege of the child: the child who has no fear of being once again wrong, of looking like an idiot, of not being serious, of not doing things like everyone else.
Solitude, if rightly used, becomes not only a privilege but a necessity. Only a superficial soul fears to fraternize with itself.
Being a role model is a privilege.
I always work with refugees and I think they are the most amazing people and it's a privilege to spend time with them, so I will always.

Simon Sebag-Montefiore famous quotes

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