Russians, in the knowledge of inexhaustible supplies of manpower, are accustomed to accepting gigantic fatalities with comparative calm.
BARBARA TUCHMANRussians, in the knowledge of inexhaustible supplies of manpower, are accustomed to accepting gigantic fatalities with comparative calm.
BARBARA TUCHMANBooks are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
BARBARA TUCHMANThe writer’s object is – or should be – to hold the reader’s attention.
BARBARA TUCHMANBusiness, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
BARBARA TUCHMANHonor wears different coats to different eyes.
BARBARA TUCHMANWhen the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.
BARBARA TUCHMANMoney was the crux. Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself.
BARBARA TUCHMANNo 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 TUCHMANHuman beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot.
BARBARA TUCHMANI want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning to the end.
BARBARA TUCHMANThe 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 TUCHMANIf it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.
BARBARA TUCHMANFor most people reform meant relief from ecclesiastical extortions.
BARBARA TUCHMANThat conflict between the reach for the divine and the lure of earthly things was to be the central problem of the Middle Ages.
BARBARA TUCHMANBooks are humanity in print.
BARBARA TUCHMANIt 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