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.
BARBARA TUCHMANThe 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.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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The Hundred Years’ War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity.
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Above all, discard the irrelevant.
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Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip.
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To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.
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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.
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To put away one’s own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.
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The fact of being reported increases the apparent extent of a deplorable development by a factor of ten.
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That conflict between the reach for the divine and the lure of earthly things was to be the central problem of the Middle Ages.
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Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.
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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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Rome had Caesar, a man of remarkable governing talents, although it must be said that a ruler who arouses opponents to resort to assassination is probably not as smart as he ought to be.
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I have always been in a condition in which I cannot not write.
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The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.
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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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We seem to be afflicted by a widespread and eroding reluctance to take any stand on any values, moral, behavioral or esthetic.
BARBARA TUCHMAN