If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.
BARBARA TUCHMANThe 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.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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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 fleet sailed to its war base in the North Sea, headed not so much for some rendezvous with glory as for rendezvous with discretion.
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What his imagination is to the poet, facts are to the historian. His exercise of judgment comes in their selection, his art in their arrangement.
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Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible.
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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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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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The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
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Doctrine tied itself into infinite knots over the realities of sex.
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Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex.
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Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers – danger, death, and live ammunition.
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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.
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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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No economic activity was more irrepressible [in the 14th century] than the investment and lending at interest of money; it was the basis for the rise of the Western capitalist economy and the building of private fortunes-and it was based on the sin of usury.
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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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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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Wisdom – meaning judgment acting on experience, common sense, available knowledge, and a decent appreciation of probability.
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The writer’s object is – or should be – to hold the reader’s attention.
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Whatever solace the Christian faith could give was balanced by the anxiety it generated.
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Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
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Voluntary self-directed religion was more dangerous to the Church than any number of infidels.
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Government remains the paramount area of folly because it is there that men seek power over others – only to lose it over themselves.
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When commerce with Moslems flourished, zeal for their massacre declined.
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Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.
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In the midst of events there is no perspective.
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Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
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Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place.
BARBARA TUCHMAN