Barbara Tuchman Quotes
[T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death.
Barbara TuchmanBarbara Tuchman If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.
Barbara TuchmanBarbara Tuchman For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use.
Barbara TuchmanBarbara Tuchman Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as “the most flagrant of all the passions.” Because it can only be satisfied by power over others, government is its favorite field of exercise.
Barbara TuchmanBarbara Tuchman Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
Barbara TuchmanBarbara Tuchman I have always felt like an artist when I work on a book. I see no reason why the word should always be confined to writers of fiction and poetry.
Barbara TuchmanBarbara 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 TuchmanBarbara Tuchman The ills and disorders of the 14th century could not be without consequence. Times were to grow worse over the next fifty-odd years until at some imperceptible moment, by the some mysterious chemistry, energies were refreshed, ideas broke out of the mold of the Middle Ages into new realms, and humanity found itself redirected.
Barbara TuchmanBarbara Tuchman Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
Barbara TuchmanBarbara Tuchman Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
Barbara TuchmanBarbara 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 TuchmanBarbara Tuchman Whatever solace the Christian faith could give was balanced by the anxiety it generated.
Barbara TuchmanBarbara Tuchman The social damage was not in the failure but in the undertaking, which was expensive. The cost of war was the poison running through the 14th century.
Barbara TuchmanBarbara Tuchman Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.
Barbara TuchmanBarbara 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 TuchmanBarbara Tuchman Wisdom – meaning judgment acting on experience, common sense, available knowledge, and a decent appreciation of probability.
Barbara TuchmanBarbara Tuchman