bureaucracy, safely repeating today what it did yesterday, rolls on as ineluctably as some vast computer, which, once penetrated by error, duplicates it forever.
BARBARA TUCHMANbureaucracy, safely repeating today what it did yesterday, rolls on as ineluctably as some vast computer, which, once penetrated by error, duplicates it forever.
BARBARA TUCHMANThe costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
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.
BARBARA TUCHMANThe ills and disorders of the 14th century could not be without consequence. Times were to grow worse over the next fifty-odd years until at some imperceptible moment, by the some mysterious chemistry, energies were refreshed, ideas broke out of the mold of the Middle Ages into new realms, and humanity found itself redirected.
BARBARA TUCHMANDoctrine tied itself into infinite knots over the realities of sex.
BARBARA TUCHMANIn individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.
BARBARA TUCHMANIn the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.
BARBARA TUCHMANBusiness 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.
BARBARA TUCHMANMore than a code of manners in war and love, Chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life.
BARBARA TUCHMANModern 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 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.
BARBARA TUCHMANWar is the unfolding of miscalculations.
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.
BARBARA TUCHMANTo a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
BARBARA TUCHMANin the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight
BARBARA TUCHMANHonor wears different coats to different eyes.
BARBARA TUCHMAN