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 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.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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Above all, discard the irrelevant.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.
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The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
For most people reform meant relief from ecclesiastical extortions.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
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.
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The social damage was not in the failure but in the undertaking, which was expensive. The cost of war was the poison running through the 14th century.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
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If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements,corrupts even more.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
One constant among the elements of 1914—as of any era—was the disposition of everyone on all sides not to prepare for the harder alternative, not to act upon what they suspected to be true.
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Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
BARBARA TUCHMAN