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[T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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The fact of being reported increases the apparent extent of a deplorable development by a factor of ten.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Words are seductive and dangerous material, to be used with caution.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
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 -
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 -
Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The nastiness of women [in the 14th century] was generally perceived at the close of life when a man began to worry about hell, and his sexual desire in any case fading.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Belgium, where there occurred one of the rare appearances of the hero in history, was lifted above herself by the uncomplicated conscience of her King and, faced with the choice to acquiesce or resist, took less than three hours to make her decision, knowing it might be mortal.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
War is the unfolding of miscalculations.
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