Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
BARBARA TUCHMANThe 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.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.
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 -
Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.
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 -
I have always been in a condition in which I cannot not write.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The social damage was not in the failure but in the undertaking, which was expensive. The cost of war was the poison running through the 14th century.
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 -
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 -
Governments do not like to face radical remedies; it is easier to let politics predominate.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
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.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Whatever solace the Christian faith could give was balanced by the anxiety it generated.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
When commerce with Moslems flourished, zeal for their massacre declined.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
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.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.
BARBARA TUCHMAN






