I ask myself, have nations ever declined from a loss of moral sense rather than from physical reasons or the pressure of barbarians? I think that they have.
BARBARA TUCHMANI have always felt like an artist when I work on a book. I see no reason why the word should always be confined to writers of fiction and poetry.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.
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Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
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Wisdom – meaning judgment acting on experience, common sense, available knowledge, and a decent appreciation of probability.
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For most people reform meant relief from ecclesiastical extortions.
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Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
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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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Confronted by menace, or what is perceived as menace, governments will usually attempt to smash it, rarely to examine it, understand it, define it.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Woman was the Church’s rival, the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the Devil’s decoy.
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To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.
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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 They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.
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Human beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot.
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The Germans could not get over the perfidy of it. It was unbelievable that the English, having degenerated to the stage where suffragettes heckled the Prime Minister and defied the police, were going to fight.
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Doctrine tied itself into infinite knots over the realities of sex.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
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 clergy [in the 14th century] on the whole were probably no more lecherous or greedy or untrustworthy than other men, but because they were supposed to be better or nearer to God than other men, their failings attracted more attention.
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Modern historians have suggested that in his last years he (Richard II) was overtaken by mental disease, but that is only a modern view of the malfunction common to 14th century rulers: inability to inhibit impulse.
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Books are the carriers of civilization… Books are humanity in print.
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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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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.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Friendship of a kind that cannot easily be reversed tomorrow must have its roots in common interests and shared beliefs.
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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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Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as “the most flagrant of all the passions.” Because it can only be satisfied by power over others, government is its favorite field of exercise.
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While husbands and lovers in the stories are of all kinds, ranging from sympathetic to disgusting, women are invariably deceivers: inconstant, unscrupulous, quarrelsome, querulous, lecherous, shameless, although not necessarily all of these at once.
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When people don’t have an objective, there’s much less dynamic effort, and that makes life a lot less interesting.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
BARBARA TUCHMAN