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 TUCHMANModern historians have suggested that in his last years he (Richard II) was overtaken by mental disease, but that is only a modern view of the malfunction common to 14th century rulers: inability to inhibit impulse.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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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.
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Voluntary self-directed religion was more dangerous to the Church than any number of infidels.
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To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.
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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.
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The conduct of war was so much more interesting than its prevention.
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No nation in the world has so many drastic problems squeezed into so small a space, under such urgent pressure of time and heavy burden of history, as Israel.
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It 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.
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Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
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Books are humanity in print.
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An essential element for good writing is a good ear: One must listen to the sound of one’s own prose.
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The open frontier, the hardships of homesteading from scratch, the wealth of natural resources.
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Government remains the paramount area of folly because it is there that men seek power over others – only to lose it over themselves.
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Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence.
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If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.
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The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
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In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.
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Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.
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In the midst of events there is no perspective.
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Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.
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Russians, in the knowledge of inexhaustible supplies of manpower, are accustomed to accepting gigantic fatalities with comparative calm.
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That conflict between the reach for the divine and the lure of earthly things was to be the central problem of the Middle Ages.
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Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
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Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible.
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Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
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Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex.
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Of all the ills that our poor … society is heir to, the focal one, it seems to me, from which so much of our uneasiness and confusion derive, is the absence of standards.
BARBARA TUCHMAN