A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.
BARBARA TUCHMANWoman was the Church’s rival, the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the Devil’s decoy.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers – danger, death, and live ammunition.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The Hundred Years’ War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
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 TUCHMAN -
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.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Russians, in the knowledge of inexhaustible supplies of manpower, are accustomed to accepting gigantic fatalities with comparative calm.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
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.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The conduct of war was so much more interesting than its prevention.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Historians who stuff in every item of research they have found, every shoelace and telephone call of a biographical subject, are not doing the hard work of selecting and shaping a readable story.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Human beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
It is wiser, I believe, to arrive at theory by way of evidence rather than the other way around…. It is more rewarding, in any case, to assemble the facts first and, in the process of arranging them in narrative form, to discover a theory or a historical generalization emerging of its own accord.
BARBARA TUCHMAN