Top 100 Barbara W. Tuchman Quotes
#1. In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#2. Despised as ineffective, they were ineffective because they were despised.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#3. Britain had an air of careless supremacy which GALLED her neighbors.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#5. One aristocratic leader's club was known for, an atmosphere of solemn tranquility, in which reading, dozing, and meditation took precedence over conversation.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#6. To establish despotism over such a mighty nation must be vain, must be fatal. We shall be forced ultimately to retreat: let us retreat when we can, not when we must.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#9. Why, since folly or perversity is expected of individuals, should we expect anything else from government?
Barbara W. Tuchman
#10. Two firing squads marched to the center of the square, faced either way and fired till no more of the targets stood upright. Six hundred and twelve bodies were identified and buried, including Felix Fivet, aged three weeks.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#11. The symptoms of depression, despair or melancholy, and lethargy were considered by the Church the sin of accidia or sloth.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#12. A minister's (cabinet member's) function was not to DO the work but to see that it got done.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#13. If a man is a writer, everybody tiptoes around past the locked door of the breadwinner. But if you're an ordinary female housewife, people say, 'This is just something Barbara wanted to do; it's not professional.'
Barbara W. Tuchman
#16. Proper society did not think about MAKING money, only about spending it.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#17. House Speaker Thomas Reed could destroy an argument or expose a fallacy in fewer words than anyone else. His language was vivid and picturesque. He had a way of phrasing things which was peculiarly apt and peculiarly his own.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#18. Books are ... companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of mind. Books are humanity in print.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#20. Is more unfair," as an English historian has well said, "than to judge men of the past by the ideas of the present. Whatever may be said of morality, political wisdom is certainly ambulatory.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#22. The irony of man's fate reflected in his image: that all men, from beggar to emperor, from harlot to queen, from ragged clerk to Pope, must come to this. No matter what their poverty or power in life, all is vanity, equalized by death.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#24. An event of great agony is bearable only in the belief that it will bring about a better world. When it does not, as in the aftermath of another vast calamity in 1914-18, disillusion is deep and moves on to self-doubt and self-disgust.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#25. He seemed less in need of a secretary than of someone to listen to him.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#26. He said that whatever the outcome in America, he would always regard it as a glory and honor to have upheld the cause which he regarded as that of all humankind.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#27. Clausewitz, a dead Prussian, and Norman Angell, a living if misunderstood professor, had combined to fasten the short-war concept upon the European mind. Quick, decisive victory was the German orthodoxy;
Barbara W. Tuchman
#28. Advice to young Samuel Gompers that might apply in many other areas: Learn from socialism, but don't join it.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#29. Talent for oratory can simulate the need for action and even thought.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#30. Now according to German logic, a declaration of war was found to be unnecessary because of imaginary bombings
Barbara W. Tuchman
#31. A regular method was the levy for a crusade, which allowed ecclesiastical income within each country to be taxed by its king, who soon came to regard it as a right.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#32. But to "settle" the Eastern Question was beyond even Disraeli's power - beyond, it seems, any human power, for it still haunts the world today.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#34. He believed interim reforms were necessary in order to fix the worker for his destiny.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#35. The utility of perseverance in absurdity is more than I could ever discern. Edmund Burke
Barbara W. Tuchman
#36. Awful momentum makes carrying through easier than calling off folly.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#37. Those deterrents - the brotherhood of socialists, the interlocking of finance, commerce, and other economic factors - which had been expected to make war impossible failed to function when the time came. Nationhood, like a wild gust of wind, arose and swept them aside. People
Barbara W. Tuchman
#38. In proportion that property is small, the danger of misusing the franchisee is great.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#39. History never repeats itself," said Voltaire; "man always does." Thucydides,
Barbara W. Tuchman
#40. Once the divinity of doctrine has been questioned there is no return to perfect faith.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#41. The amount the rich could squander on occasions like these in a period of repeated disasters appears inexplicable, not so much with regard to motive as with regard to means.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#43. To think meant to give room for freedom of initiative, for the imponderable to win over the material, for will to demonstrate its power over circumstance.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#44. Impunity in such affairs was no longer a matter of course, for the King was Louis IX, a sovereign whose sense of rulership was equal to his piety.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#46. Executions were meant as an exercise in frightfulness according to the theory developed by the Emperor Caligula: "Oderint dum metuant" (Let them hate us as long as they fear us).
Barbara W. Tuchman
#48. Of England's patrician class, the author writes: It was easy to be agreeable when everything was done to keep them in comfort and ease.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#49. He said, McKinley was going around the country shouting prosperity when there was no prosperity for the poor man.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#50. He was the most persuasive speaker, less for his words than character behind them. He made every listener feel he had done his best to master every aspect of this question, who has been driven by logic to arrive at certain conclusions, and who is disguising from us no argument on either side.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#51. Finished their compulsory training under universal service and were between the ages of twenty-three and thirty-four were classed as reserves. Upon mobilization the youngest classes filled out the regular army units to war strength; the others were formed into reserve regiments,
Barbara W. Tuchman
#52. Once people envisioned the possibility of change in a fixed order, the end of an age of submission came in sight; the turn to individual conscience lay ahead. To that extent the Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#53. The impetus of existing plans is always stronger than the impulse to change. The Kaiser could not change Moltke's plan nor could Kitchener alter Henry Wilson's nor Lanrezac alter Joffre's.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#54. Chronicling future appeasing Prime Minister Joseph Chamberlain's rise to Parliament from first-generation commercial interests rather than the aristocracy, the author diagnoses even then that he had no center outside himself.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#55. The succession multiplied the harm. Each passed on his conception of the papacy unchanged.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#58. His decision suggests that an absence of overriding personal ambition together with shrewd common sense are among the essential components of wisdom.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#60. Double et louche (a provocative phrase which could mean "double and squinting" or "equivocal" or "shady" in the sense of disreputable).
Barbara W. Tuchman
#61. Far from a source of suffering, their adopted faith had been a source of power.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#62. He had become, through a combination of heritage and character, a keeper of the national conscience.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#63. The only really detestable character in Chaucer's company of Canterbury pilgrims is the Pardoner with his stringy locks, his eunuch's hairless skin, his glaring eyes like a hare's, and his brazen acknowledgment of the tricks and deceits of his trade.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#66. Can the military art be learned in the games and hunts in which you pass your youth?" The
Barbara W. Tuchman
#67. Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#68. The reality of a question is inevitably more complicated than we would like to suppose.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#69. Moltke closed upon that rigid phrase, the basis for every major German mistake, the phrase that launched the invasion of Belgium and the submarine war against the United States, the inevitable phrase when military plans dictate policy - and once settled it cannot be altered.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#70. His only weakness was the habit of prophesying war within the next fortnight. George Bernard Shaw
Barbara W. Tuchman
#72. Hours of the day were named for the hours of prayer: matins around midnight; lauds around three A.M.; prime, the first hour of daylight, at sunrise or about six A.M.; vespers at six in the evening; and compline at bedtime.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#73. The textile industry was the automobile industry of the Middle Ages,
Barbara W. Tuchman
#74. Believing themselves superior in soul, in strength, in energy, industry, and national virtue, Germans felt they deserved the dominion of Europe.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#75. The writer's object should be to hold the reader's attention. I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning until the end. This is accomplished only when the narrative moves steadily ahead, not when it comes to a weary standstill, overloaded with every item uncovered in the research.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#77. To be right and overruled is not forgiven to persons in responsible positions, and Michel duly paid for his clairvoyance.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#79. Humanizing war?! You may as well talk of humanizing Hell. Sir John Fisher
Barbara W. Tuchman
#81. House speaker Thomas read could see the trend, but he could not have changed himself.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#82. Because life was collective, it was intensely sociable and dependent on etiquette, hence the emphasis on courteous conduct and clean fingernails.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#83. What the Ambassador was witnessing - in idea, if not yet in fact - was the transfer of power from its arbitrary exercise by nobles and monarchs to power stationed in a constitution and in representation of the people. The period of the transfer, coinciding with his own career, from 1767 to 1797,
Barbara W. Tuchman
#84. Revolutions produce other men, not new men. Halfway between truth and endless error, the mold of the species is permanent. That is Earth's burden.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#86. Devout or not, all owned and carried Books of Hours, the characteristic fashionable religious possession of the 14th century noble.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#87. The art of oratory was considered part of the equipment of a statesman.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#89. The blood libel took possession of the popular mind most rabidly in Germany, where the well-poisoning charge too had originated in the 12th century.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#90. Also usually employed one or more resident physicians, barbers, priests, painters, musicians, minstrels, secretaries and copyists, an astrologer, a jester, and a dwarf, besides pages and squires.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#91. This suggests that Palestine already had begun to suffer the soil erosion that during the centuries of Arab cultivation reduced it from the one-time land of milk and honey to a stony goat pasture. Saewulf
Barbara W. Tuchman
#92. The country listened to thousands of speeches and read thousands of newspaper columns raking over every argument for and against imperialism and every aspect of the war in the Philippines.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#94. If the historian will submit himself to his material instead of trying to impose himself on his material, then the material will ultimately speak to him and supply the answers.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#95. Penalties were established for refusal to work, for leaving a place of employment to seek higher pay, and for the offer of higher pay by employers. Proclaimed when Parliament was not sitting, the ordinance was reissued in 1351 as the Statute of Laborers.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#96. Had I known that these legs were to carry a Lord Chancellor, I would have taken better care of them when I was a lad. Duke of Grafton
Barbara W. Tuchman
#97. The daughter is the goddess, separately or together, of Infatuation, Mischief, Delusion and Blind Folly, rendering her victims "incapable of rational choice" and blind to distinctions of morality and expedience.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#98. Women were considered the snare of the Devil, while at the same time the cult of the Virgin made one woman the central object of love and adoration.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#99. Money was evil, beauty vain, and both were transitory. Ambition was pride, desire for gain was avarice, desire of the flesh was lust, desire for honor, even for knowledge and beauty, was vainglory. Insofar as these diverted man from seeking the life of the spirit, they were sinful.
Barbara W. Tuchman
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