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 TUCHMANVoluntary self-directed religion was more dangerous to the Church than any number of infidels.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
In the midst of events there is no perspective.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Governments do not like to face radical remedies; it is easier to let politics predominate.
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.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
War is the unfolding of miscalculations.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
That the Jews were unholy was a belief so ingrained by the Church [by the 14th century] that the most devout persons were the harshest in their antipathy, none more so than St. Louis.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Woman was the Church’s rival, the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the Devil’s decoy.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
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.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Modern 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.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female.
BARBARA TUCHMAN