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 TUCHMANNo 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.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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I have always been in a condition in which I cannot not write.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
To put away one’s own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
To be right and overruled is not forgiven to persons in responsible positions.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
If wisdom in government eludes us, perhaps courage could substitute-the moral courage to terminate mistakes.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
I ask myself, have nations ever declined from a loss of moral sense rather than from physical reasons or the pressure of barbarians? I think that they have.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.
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 -
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 -
I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning to the end.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
[T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The open frontier, the hardships of homesteading from scratch, the wealth of natural resources.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Of all the ills that our poor … society is heir to, the focal one, it seems to me, from which so much of our uneasiness and confusion derive, is the absence of standards.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
We seem to be afflicted by a widespread and eroding reluctance to take any stand on any values, moral, behavioral or esthetic.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The power to command frequently causes failure to think.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
More than a code of manners in war and love, Chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Russians, in the knowledge of inexhaustible supplies of manpower, are accustomed to accepting gigantic fatalities with comparative calm.
BARBARA TUCHMAN