Top 72 Barbara Tuchman Quotes
#1. I have always been in a condition in which I cannot not write.
Barbara Tuchman
#2. When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.
Barbara Tuchman
#3. No female iniquity was more severely condemned [in the 14th century] than the habit of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten the forehead.
Barbara Tuchman
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. What his imagination is to the poet, facts are to the historian. His exercise of judgment comes in their selection, his art in their arrangement.
Barbara Tuchman
#7. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.
Barbara Tuchman
#8. Woman [in the 14th century] was the Church's rival, the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the Devil's decoy.
Barbara Tuchman
#9. Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
Barbara Tuchman
#10. 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
#11. 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 Tuchman
#12. That the Jews were unholy was a belief so ingrained by the Church [by the 14th century] that the most devout persons were the harshest in their antipathy, none more so than St. Louis.
Barbara Tuchman
#14. The power to command frequently causes failure to think.
Barbara Tuchman
#15. Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.
Barbara Tuchman
#16. Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.
Barbara Tuchman
#17. 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
#18. The fleet sailed to its war base in the North Sea, headed not so much for some rendezvous with glory as for rendezvous with discretion.
Barbara Tuchman
#19. 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 Tuchman
#20. 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
#21. One must stop conducting research before one has finished. Otherwise, one will never stop and never finish.
Barbara Tuchman
#22. More than a code of manners in war and love, Chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life ...
Barbara Tuchman
#23. Of all the ills that our poor ... society is heir to, the focal one, it seems to me, from which so much of our uneasiness and confusion derive, is the absence of standards.
Barbara Tuchman
#24. Modern historians have suggested that in his last years he (Richard II) was overtaken by mental disease, but that is only a modern view of the malfunction common to 14th century rulers: inability to inhibit impulse.
Barbara Tuchman
#25. 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
#26. To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
Barbara Tuchman
#28. To put away one's own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.
Barbara Tuchman
#29. Russians, in the knowledge of inexhaustible supplies of manpower, are accustomed to accepting gigantic fatalities with comparative calm.
Barbara Tuchman
#30. 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 Tuchman
#31. In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.
Barbara Tuchman
#32. Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
Barbara Tuchman
#33. To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.
Barbara Tuchman
#34. 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
#35. When commerce with Moslems flourished, zeal for their massacre declined.
Barbara Tuchman
#36. The conduct of war was so much more interesting than its prevention.
Barbara Tuchman
#38. Voluntary self-directed religion was more dangerous to the Church than any number of infidels.
Barbara Tuchman
#39. Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.
Barbara Tuchman
#40. If wisdom in government eludes us, perhaps courage could substitute-the moral courage to terminate mistakes.
Barbara Tuchman
#41. Government remains the paramount area of folly because it is there that men seek power over others - only to lose it over themselves.
Barbara Tuchman
#42. While husbands and lovers in the stories [of the 14th century] are of all kinds, ranging from sympathetic to disgusting, women are invariably deceivers: inconstant, unscrupulous, quarrelsome, querulous, lecherous, shameless, although not necessarily all of these at once.
Barbara Tuchman
#43. No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.
Barbara Tuchman
#44. For most people reform meant relief from ecclesiastical extortions.
Barbara Tuchman
#45. Words are seductive and dangerous material, to be used with caution.
Barbara Tuchman
#46. 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 Tuchman
#48. 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
#49. Wisdom - meaning judgment acting on experience, common sense, available knowledge, and a decent appreciation of probability.
Barbara Tuchman
#50. Bureaucracy, safely repeating today what it did yesterday, rolls on as ineluctably as some vast computer, which, once penetrated by error, duplicates it forever.
Barbara Tuchman
#51. If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements,corrupts even more.
Barbara Tuchman
#52. The better part of valor is to spend it learning to live with differences, however hostile, unless and until we can find another planet.
Barbara Tuchman
#53. When people don't have an objective, there's much less dynamic effort, and that makes life a lot less interesting.
Barbara Tuchman
#54. Whatever solace the Christian faith could give was balanced by the anxiety it generated.
Barbara Tuchman
#55. The Hundred Years' War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity.
Barbara Tuchman
#56. Satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
Barbara Tuchman
#57. If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.
Barbara Tuchman
#58. An essential element for good writing is a good ear: One must listen to the sound of one's own prose.
Barbara Tuchman
#60. Friendship of a kind that cannot easily be reversed tomorrow must have its roots in common interests and shared beliefs.
Barbara Tuchman
#61. Governments do not like to face radical remedies; it is easier to let politics predominate.
Barbara Tuchman
#62. No nation in the world has so many drastic problems squeezed into so small a space, under such urgent pressure of time and heavy burden of history, as Israel.
Barbara Tuchman
#63. If all were equalized by death, as the medieval idea constantly emphasized, was it not possible that inequalities on earth were contrary to the will of God?
Barbara Tuchman
#64. The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
Barbara Tuchman
#65. The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians ...
Barbara Tuchman
#66. The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard.
Barbara Tuchman
#67. Diplomacy means all the wicked devices of the Old World, spheres of influence, balances of power, secret treaties, triple alliances, and, during the interim period, appeasement of Fascism.
Barbara Tuchman
#68. Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip.
Barbara Tuchman
#69. The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.
Barbara Tuchman
#70. To be a bestseller is not necessarily a measure of quality, but it is a measure of communication.
Barbara Tuchman
#71. The fact of being reported increases the apparent extent of a deplorable development by a factor of ten.
Barbara Tuchman
#72. Doctrine tied itself into infinite knots over the realities of sex.
Barbara Tuchman
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