The Hundred Years’ War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity.
BARBARA TUCHMANThey are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
-
-
They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
While husbands and lovers in the stories are of all kinds, ranging from sympathetic to disgusting, women are invariably deceivers: inconstant, unscrupulous, quarrelsome, querulous, lecherous, shameless, although not necessarily all of these at once.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The open frontier, the hardships of homesteading from scratch, the wealth of natural resources.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
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.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
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.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning to the end.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
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.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as “the most flagrant of all the passions.” Because it can only be satisfied by power over others, government is its favorite field of exercise.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Above all, discard the irrelevant.
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 -
No less a bold and pugnacious figure than Winston Churchill broke down and was unable to finish his remarks at the sendoff of the British Expeditionary Force into the maelstrom of World War I in Europe.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
To 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.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Words are seductive and dangerous material, to be used with caution.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Wisdom – meaning judgment acting on experience, common sense, available knowledge, and a decent appreciation of probability.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The conduct of war was so much more interesting than its prevention.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The reality of a question is inevitably more complicated than we would like to suppose.
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