The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
BARBARA TUCHMANThe writer’s object is – or should be – to hold the reader’s attention.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
-
-
To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The Hundred Years’ War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.
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.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The nastiness of women [in the 14th century] was generally perceived at the close of life when a man began to worry about hell, and his sexual desire in any case fading.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
In the midst of events there is no perspective.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
In the search for meaning we must not forget that the gods (or God, for that matter) are a concept of the human mind; they are the creatures of man, not vice versa. They are needed and invented to give meaning and purpose to the struggle that is life on Earth.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The better part of valor is to spend it learning to live with differences, however hostile, unless and until we can find another planet.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
To be right and overruled is not forgiven to persons in responsible positions.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
That conflict between the reach for the divine and the lure of earthly things was to be the central problem of the Middle Ages.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
To explain strange and irregular phenomena of nature, haphazard events and, above all, irrational human conduct. They exist to bear the burden of all things that cannot be comprehended except by supernatural intervention or design.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
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 They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
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.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
in the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Human behavior is timeless.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Belgium, where there occurred one of the rare appearances of the hero in history, was lifted above herself by the uncomplicated conscience of her King and, faced with the choice to acquiesce or resist, took less than three hours to make her decision, knowing it might be mortal.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
No female iniquity was more severely condemned than the habit of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten the forehead.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
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 -
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
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.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Governments do not like to face radical remedies; it is easier to let politics predominate.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.
BARBARA TUCHMAN