I have always been in a condition in which I cannot not write.
BARBARA TUCHMANThe 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.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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Friendship of a kind that cannot easily be reversed tomorrow must have its roots in common interests and shared beliefs.
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The conduct of war was so much more interesting than its prevention.
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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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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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To put away one’s own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.
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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.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
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 They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.
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The reality of a question is inevitably more complicated than we would like to suppose.
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In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.
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More than a code of manners in war and love, Chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life.
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Money 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 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 -
Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.
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 -
The power to command frequently causes failure to think.
BARBARA TUCHMAN