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 TUCHMANNo 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.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.
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Completeness is rare in history.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Doctrine tied itself into infinite knots over the realities of sex.
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 -
I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning to the end.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Diplomacy means all the wicked devices of the Old World, spheres of influence, balances of power, secret treaties, triple alliances, and, during the interim period, appeasement of Fascism.
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Whatever solace the Christian faith could give was balanced by the anxiety it generated.
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Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers – danger, death, and live ammunition.
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The power to command frequently causes failure to think.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
That conflict between the reach for the divine and the lure of earthly things was to be the central problem of the Middle Ages.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
bureaucracy, safely repeating today what it did yesterday, rolls on as ineluctably as some vast computer, which, once penetrated by error, duplicates it forever.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
If all were equalized by death, as the medieval idea constantly emphasized, was it not possible that inequalities on earth were contrary to the will of God?
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Government remains the paramount area of folly because it is there that men seek power over others – only to lose it over themselves.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Russians, in the knowledge of inexhaustible supplies of manpower, are accustomed to accepting gigantic fatalities with comparative calm.
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.
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The fact of being reported increases the apparent extent of a deplorable development by a factor of ten.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The story and study of the past, both recent and distant, will not reveal the future, but it flashes beacon lights along the way and it is a useful nostrum against despair.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The reality of a question is inevitably more complicated than we would like to suppose.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
For me, the card catalog has been a companion all my working life. To leave it is like leaving the house one was brought up in.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
If wisdom in government eludes us, perhaps courage could substitute-the moral courage to terminate mistakes.
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Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.
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in the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight
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No female iniquity was more severely condemned than the habit of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten the forehead.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex.
BARBARA TUCHMAN