Barbara Tuchman Quotes
To gain victory over the flesh was the purpose of fasting and celibacy, which denied the pleasures of this world for the sake of reward in the next.
Barbara TuchmanBarbara Tuchman The open frontier, the hardships of homesteading from scratch, the wealth of natural resources.
Barbara TuchmanBarbara Tuchman If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements,corrupts even more.
Barbara TuchmanBarbara Tuchman I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning to the end.
Barbara TuchmanBarbara Tuchman I ask myself, have nations ever declined from a loss of moral sense rather than from physical reasons or the pressure of barbarians? I think that they have.
Barbara TuchmanBarbara Tuchman If wisdom in government eludes us, perhaps courage could substitute-the moral courage to terminate mistakes.
Barbara TuchmanBarbara Tuchman The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard
Barbara TuchmanBarbara Tuchman Completeness is rare in history.
Barbara TuchmanBarbara 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 TuchmanBarbara Tuchman The fact of being reported increases the apparent extent of a deplorable development by a factor of ten.
Barbara TuchmanBarbara Tuchman Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female.
Barbara TuchmanBarbara 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 TuchmanBarbara Tuchman Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
Barbara TuchmanBarbara Tuchman Woman was the Church’s rival, the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the Devil’s decoy.
Barbara TuchmanBarbara Tuchman When commerce with Moslems flourished, zeal for their massacre declined.
Barbara TuchmanBarbara 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 TuchmanBarbara Tuchman