They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.
BARBARA TUCHMANChristianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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War is the unfolding of miscalculations.
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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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To gain victory over the flesh was the purpose of fasting and celibacy, which denied the pleasures of this world for the sake of reward in the next.
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No nation in the world has so many drastic problems squeezed into so small a space, under such urgent pressure of time and heavy burden of history, as Israel.
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Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.
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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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Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
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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 Church [in the 14th century] gave ceremony and dignity to lives that had little of either. It was the source of beauty and art to which all had some access and which many helped to create.
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Words are seductive and dangerous material, to be used with caution.
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That the Jews were unholy was a belief so ingrained by the Church [by the 14th century] that the most devout persons were the harshest in their antipathy, none more so than St. Louis.
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Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence.
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The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
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Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government, and when combined with a position of power even more so.
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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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Business offers a kind of power, but only to the very successful at the top, and without the dominion and titles and red carpets and motorcycle escorts of public office.
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Human behavior is timeless.
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More than a code of manners in war and love, Chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life.
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Books are the carriers of civilization… Books are humanity in print.
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Books are humanity in print.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
We seem to be afflicted by a widespread and eroding reluctance to take any stand on any values, moral, behavioral or esthetic.
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If all were equalized by death, as the medieval idea constantly emphasized, was it not possible that inequalities on earth were contrary to the will of God?
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To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
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In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.
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Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.
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When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.
BARBARA TUCHMAN