No 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 TUCHMANThe better part of valor is to spend it learning to live with differences, however hostile, unless and until we can find another planet.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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To gain victory over the flesh was the purpose of fasting and celibacy, which denied the pleasures of this world for the sake of reward in the next.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The 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 TUCHMAN -
Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The writer’s object is – or should be – to hold the reader’s attention.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
I have always been in a condition in which I cannot not write.
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 -
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 -
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The fleet sailed to its war base in the North Sea, headed not so much for some rendezvous with glory as for rendezvous with discretion.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Friendship of a kind that cannot easily be reversed tomorrow must have its roots in common interests and shared beliefs.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.
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I have always felt like an artist when I work on a book. I see no reason why the word should always be confined to writers of fiction and poetry.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Books are humanity in print.
BARBARA TUCHMAN