Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
BARBARA TUCHMANHonor wears different coats to different eyes.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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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 -
No female iniquity was more severely condemned than the habit of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten the forehead.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The fact of being reported increases the apparent extent of a deplorable development by a factor of ten.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
It is wiser, I believe, to arrive at theory by way of evidence rather than the other way around…. It is more rewarding, in any case, to assemble the facts first and, in the process of arranging them in narrative form, to discover a theory or a historical generalization emerging of its own accord.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Voluntary self-directed religion was more dangerous to the Church than any number of infidels.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Wisdom – meaning judgment acting on experience, common sense, available knowledge, and a decent appreciation of probability.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.
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 -
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 -
More than a code of manners in war and love, Chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The clergy [in the 14th century] on the whole were probably no more lecherous or greedy or untrustworthy than other men, but because they were supposed to be better or nearer to God than other men, their failings attracted more attention.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Rome had Caesar, a man of remarkable governing talents, although it must be said that a ruler who arouses opponents to resort to assassination is probably not as smart as he ought to be.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
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 reality of a question is inevitably more complicated than we would like to suppose.
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 -
The open frontier, the hardships of homesteading from scratch, the wealth of natural resources.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
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 TUCHMAN -
in the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The Church [in the 14th century] gave ceremony and dignity to lives that had little of either. It was the source of beauty and art to which all had some access and which many helped to create.
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 whole vast challenge of a continent waiting to be exploited, combined to produce a prevailing materialism and an American drive bent as much, if not more, on money, property, and power than was true of the Old World from which we had fled.
BARBARA TUCHMAN