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.
BARBARA TUCHMANTo gain victory over the flesh was the purpose of fasting and celibacy, which denied the pleasures of this world for the sake of reward in the next.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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Business 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.
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Human behavior is timeless.
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 -
For most people reform meant relief from ecclesiastical extortions.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The clergy [in the 14th century] on the whole were probably no more lecherous or greedy or untrustworthy than other men, but because they were supposed to be better or nearer to God than other men, their failings attracted more attention.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
I have always felt like an artist when I work on a book. I see no reason why the word should always be confined to writers of fiction and poetry.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Doctrine tied itself into infinite knots over the realities of sex.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
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 -
The writer’s object is – or should be – to hold the reader’s attention.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced
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[T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death.
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






