Books are humanity in print.
BARBARA TUCHMANNo 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.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
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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 -
Confronted by menace, or what is perceived as menace, governments will usually attempt to smash it, rarely to examine it, understand it, define it.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Woman was the Church’s rival, the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the Devil’s decoy.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The writer’s object is – or should be – to hold the reader’s attention.
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Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.
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Human behavior is timeless.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Human beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The Germans could not get over the perfidy of it. It was unbelievable that the English, having degenerated to the stage where suffragettes heckled the Prime Minister and defied the police, were going to fight.
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 -
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 -
in the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight
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When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Words are seductive and dangerous material, to be used with caution.
BARBARA TUCHMAN