When commerce with Moslems flourished, zeal for their massacre declined.
BARBARA TUCHMANTo a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
War is the unfolding of miscalculations.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Words are seductive and dangerous material, to be used with caution.
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 -
I have always been in a condition in which I cannot not write.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
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 -
In the search for meaning we must not forget that the gods (or God, for that matter) are a concept of the human mind; they are the creatures of man, not vice versa. They are needed and invented to give meaning and purpose to the struggle that is life on Earth.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
What his imagination is to the poet, facts are to the historian. His exercise of judgment comes in their selection, his art in their arrangement.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The open frontier, the hardships of homesteading from scratch, the wealth of natural resources.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Wisdom – meaning judgment acting on experience, common sense, available knowledge, and a decent appreciation of probability.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning to the end.
BARBARA TUCHMAN






