Barbara W Tuchman Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. Now according to German logic, a declaration of war was found to be unnecessary because of imaginary bombings

Barbara W. Tuchman

#4. Talent for oratory can simulate the need for action and even thought.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#5. Advice to young Samuel Gompers that might apply in many other areas: Learn from socialism, but don't join it.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#6. 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

#7. Fate represents the fulfillment of man's expectations of himself.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#8. 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

#9. In this atmosphere of doubt why was the extreme risk approved? Partly because exasperation at the failure of all her efforts at intimidation had led to an all-or-nothing state of mind and a helpless yielding like Bethmann's by the civilians to the military.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#10. Though surnamed the Wise, he was not immune from the occupational disease of rulers: overestimation of their capacity to control events. No

Barbara W. Tuchman

#11. He seemed less in need of a secretary than of someone to listen to him.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#12. 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

#13. were being ravaged by her brother. In their agreement Amadeus

Barbara W. Tuchman

#14. 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

#15. If he had a little more brains he would be a half-wit.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#16. 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

#17. Canada was regarded as a hostage to restrain Britain,

Barbara W. Tuchman

#18. The English patrician bloomed in his natural climate.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#19. If there have been mute inglorious Miltons in rural villages, presumably there have been unrealized Washingtons born in unpropitious times.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#20. Although 1870 proved the corollary of the theory and practice of terror, that it deepens antagonism, stimulates resistance, and ends by lengthening war, the Germans remained wedded to it.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#21. Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#22. Books are ... companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of mind. Books are humanity in print.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#23. A reformer exhorted children that they would succeed where he and his colleagues had failed with the charge: Live for that better day.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#24. Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers - danger, death, and live ammunition.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#25. 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

#26. Policy was not reconsidered because the governing group had no habit of purposeful consultation.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#27. 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

#28. Once the divinity of doctrine has been questioned there is no return to perfect faith.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#29. Rule was still personal, deriving from the fief of land and oath of homage. Not citizen to state but vassal to lord was the bond that underlay political structure.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#30. When the children were very small, I worked in the morning only, and then gradually, as they spent full days at school, I could spend full days at work.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#31. No single characteristic ever overtakes an entire society.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#32. Extravagant sartorial display had a purpose. It created the impression of wealth and power on the opponent and pride in the wearer which has been lost sight of in our nervously egalitarian times.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#33. History never repeats itself," said Voltaire; "man always does." Thucydides,

Barbara W. Tuchman

#34. Between the happening of a historical process and its recognition by rulers, a lag stretches, full of pitfalls.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#35. In proportion that property is small, the danger of misusing the franchisee is great.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#36. Each day he grew older and learned something new." Strong

Barbara W. Tuchman

#37. Each one of us is serious individually, but together we become frivolous.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#38. Mankind's tragedy is that he can draw up blueprints for a better life but he cannot live up to them.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#39. These cumbersome vehicles were as convenient as if dinosaurs had survived to be used by cowboys for driving cattle

Barbara W. Tuchman

#40. To plunge into passionate dispute over the trivialities of so-called honor is a queerer but not uncommon gambit of men who have just come from putting their lives at stake in serious combat,

Barbara W. Tuchman

#41. 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

#42. The fief of Coucy from the Church; it was now held directly of the King, and its seigneur paid homage only to the King's person.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#43. Armed forces were no longer primarily feudal levies serving under a vassal's obligation who went home after forty days; they were recruited bodies who served for pay.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#44. As there would be no more inheritance, there would be no more greed. Peter Kropotkin

Barbara W. Tuchman

#45. Fine dressing could not be suppressed despite ever-renewed sumptuary laws which tried especially and repeatedly to outlaw the pointed shoes.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#46. Awful momentum makes carrying through easier than calling off folly.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#47. The utility of perseverance in absurdity is more than I could ever discern. Edmund Burke

Barbara W. Tuchman

#48. It is necessary to salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman pontiff.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#49. He believed interim reforms were necessary in order to fix the worker for his destiny.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#50. His one essay in love had exhausted his powers in that direction.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#51. 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

#52. the Regents' dislike of the social "leveling" they sensed in the Revolution was stronger.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#53. Let us retreat when we can, not when we must. Lord Chatham

Barbara W. Tuchman

#54. The road to India, the Suez Canal, the oil fields of Mosul, the whole complex of political and strategic requirements that drew Britain into Palestine in 1918, began with the enterprise of the Elizabethan merchant adventurers.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#55. Hubert Humphrey advised new members, If you feel an urge to stand up and make a speech attacking Vietnamese policy, don't make it.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#56. In the case of a Gascon seigneur of the 14th century who left 100 livres to those whom I deflowered, if they can be found.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#57. Everything took on the color of blood.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#58. 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 W. Tuchman

#59. explicit communiqu

Barbara W. Tuchman

#60. He never hears the truth about himself by not wishing to hear it. Pope Alexander

Barbara W. Tuchman

#61. One constant among the elements of 1914 - as of any era - was the disposition of everyone on all sides not to prepare for the harder alternative, not to act upon what they suspected to be true.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#62. 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

#63. Was compared by Dante to both a slave and a brothel.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#64. Supposed to be commissioned by the Church, the pardoners would sell absolution for any sin from gluttony to homicide, cancel any vow of chastity or fasting, remit any penance for money, most of which they pocketed.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#65. Everything interested him and everything excited him.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#66. Malignant phenomena do not come out of a golden age.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#67. No one is is sure of his premise as the man who knows too little.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#68. He wanted AFFIRMATION rather than INFORMATION.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#69. Nations, like people, are often more pragmatic than they know or can explain.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#70. Belgium's declared intention to fight was, the Germans believed, no more than the "rage of dreaming sheep" - in the words a Prussian statesman once applied to his domestic opponents.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#71. If it was bliss to be alive, to hunt was rapture.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#72. Britain had an air of careless supremacy which GALLED her neighbors.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#73. Anything that protracted a campaign Clausewitz condemned. "Gradual reduction" of the enemy, or a war of attrition, he feared like the pit of hell.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#74. Despised as ineffective, they were ineffective because they were despised.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#75. In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#76. All this visible greatness was really one with Nineveh and Tyre.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#77. The tribal pull of patriotism could have no better testimony.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#78. When meeting criticism, he would regard it not as something to resent but as a thing to be examined, like an interesting beetle. That's a curious view, not uninteresting.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#79. Books are the carriers of civilization ... They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#80. Proper society did not think about MAKING money, only about spending it.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#81. The cracking of old and famous structures is slow and internal, while the facade holds.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#82. Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#83. War is the unfolding of miscalculations.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#84. As guardians of a continuity of religious and racial tradition" the Zionists were, Balfour decided, "a great conservative force in world politics." Immediately

Barbara W. Tuchman

#85. The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#86. He had the ruthlessness of uninterrupted success.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#87. What other country has had the privilege of making the world's heart beat faster?

Barbara W. Tuchman

#88. 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

#89. It is clearer now that no anti-Semitic government in any country has ever helped its scapegoats to leave by any other door than death.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#90. To admit error and cut losses is rare among individuals, unknown among states. States function only in terms of what those in control perceive as power or personal ambition, and both of these wear blinkers.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#91. Command, deprived of personal judgment, can win no battles.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#92. The writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#93. Marco Polo dictated his Travels in French,

Barbara W. Tuchman

#94. The Empire had no political cohesion, no capital city, no common laws, common finances, or common officials. It was the relic of a dead ideal.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#95. The limitation prompting folly was an attitude of superiority so dense as to be impenetrable.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#96. A minister's (cabinet member's) function was not to DO the work but to see that it got done.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#97. The symptoms of depression, despair or melancholy, and lethargy were considered by the Church the sin of accidia or sloth.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#98. The occasions when an individual is able to harness a nation are memorable, and Grey's speech proved to be one of those junctures by which people afterward date events.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#99. 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

#100. Why, since folly or perversity is expected of individuals, should we expect anything else from government?

Barbara W. Tuchman