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 TUCHMANTo 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 They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
-
-
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 open frontier, the hardships of homesteading from scratch, the wealth of natural resources.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning to the end.
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 -
The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The fact of being reported increases the apparent extent of a deplorable development by a factor of ten.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
[T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
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 -
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 -
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 -
Doctrine tied itself into infinite knots over the realities of sex.
BARBARA TUCHMAN