Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.
BARBARA TUCHMANThe ills and disorders of the 14th century could not be without consequence. Times were to grow worse over the next fifty-odd years until at some imperceptible moment, by the some mysterious chemistry, energies were refreshed, ideas broke out of the mold of the Middle Ages into new realms, and humanity found itself redirected.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female.
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Whatever solace the Christian faith could give was balanced by the anxiety it generated.
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bureaucracy, safely repeating today what it did yesterday, rolls on as ineluctably as some vast computer, which, once penetrated by error, duplicates it forever.
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The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.
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Diplomacy means all the wicked devices of the Old World, spheres of influence, balances of power, secret treaties, triple alliances, and, during the interim period, appeasement of Fascism.
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Of all the ills that our poor … society is heir to, the focal one, it seems to me, from which so much of our uneasiness and confusion derive, is the absence of standards.
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The better part of valor is to spend it learning to live with differences, however hostile, unless and until we can find another planet.
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The story and study of the past, both recent and distant, will not reveal the future, but it flashes beacon lights along the way and it is a useful nostrum against despair.
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In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.
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The whole vast challenge of a continent waiting to be exploited, combined to produce a prevailing materialism and an American drive bent as much, if not more, on money, property, and power than was true of the Old World from which we had fled.
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The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard
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I have always been in a condition in which I cannot not write.
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In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.
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Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex.
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A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.
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In the midst of events there is no perspective.
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To be a bestseller is not necessarily a measure of quality, but it is a measure of communication.
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No less a bold and pugnacious figure than Winston Churchill broke down and was unable to finish his remarks at the sendoff of the British Expeditionary Force into the maelstrom of World War I in Europe.
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Money was the crux. Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself.
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When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.
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The open frontier, the hardships of homesteading from scratch, the wealth of natural resources.
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Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
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To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.
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For me, the card catalog has been a companion all my working life. To leave it is like leaving the house one was brought up in.
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Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible.
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Doctrine tied itself into infinite knots over the realities of sex.
BARBARA TUCHMAN