Top 100 Barbara W Tuchman Quotes
#1. 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
#2. In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#3. Despised as ineffective, they were ineffective because they were despised.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#4. 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
#5. Britain had an air of careless supremacy which GALLED her neighbors.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#7. 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
#8. Nations, like people, are often more pragmatic than they know or can explain.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#13. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. He never hears the truth about himself by not wishing to hear it. Pope Alexander
Barbara W. Tuchman
#19. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#25. the Regents' dislike of the social "leveling" they sensed in the Revolution was stronger.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#26. 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
#27. Why, since folly or perversity is expected of individuals, should we expect anything else from government?
Barbara W. Tuchman
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. The symptoms of depression, despair or melancholy, and lethargy were considered by the Church the sin of accidia or sloth.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#31. A minister's (cabinet member's) function was not to DO the work but to see that it got done.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#32. The limitation prompting folly was an attitude of superiority so dense as to be impenetrable.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#33. 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
#35. The writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#37. 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
#39. 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
#40. What other country has had the privilege of making the world's heart beat faster?
Barbara W. Tuchman
#42. The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#43. 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
#46. The cracking of old and famous structures is slow and internal, while the facade holds.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#47. Proper society did not think about MAKING money, only about spending it.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#48. 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
#49. 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
#51. These cumbersome vehicles were as convenient as if dinosaurs had survived to be used by cowboys for driving cattle
Barbara W. Tuchman
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. Books are ... companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of mind. Books are humanity in print.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. If there have been mute inglorious Miltons in rural villages, presumably there have been unrealized Washingtons born in unpropitious times.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#61. 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
#63. 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
#65. 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
#66. He seemed less in need of a secretary than of someone to listen to him.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#71. 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
#72. Advice to young Samuel Gompers that might apply in many other areas: Learn from socialism, but don't join it.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#73. Talent for oratory can simulate the need for action and even thought.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#74. Now according to German logic, a declaration of war was found to be unnecessary because of imaginary bombings
Barbara W. Tuchman
#75. 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
#76. 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
#78. He believed interim reforms were necessary in order to fix the worker for his destiny.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#79. It is necessary to salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman pontiff.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#80. The utility of perseverance in absurdity is more than I could ever discern. Edmund Burke
Barbara W. Tuchman
#81. Awful momentum makes carrying through easier than calling off folly.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#82. Fine dressing could not be suppressed despite ever-renewed sumptuary laws which tried especially and repeatedly to outlaw the pointed shoes.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#83. As there would be no more inheritance, there would be no more greed. Peter Kropotkin
Barbara W. Tuchman
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. Policy was not reconsidered because the governing group had no habit of purposeful consultation.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#89. Mankind's tragedy is that he can draw up blueprints for a better life but he cannot live up to them.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#90. Each one of us is serious individually, but together we become frivolous.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#92. In proportion that property is small, the danger of misusing the franchisee is great.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#93. Between the happening of a historical process and its recognition by rulers, a lag stretches, full of pitfalls.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#94. History never repeats itself," said Voltaire; "man always does." Thucydides,
Barbara W. Tuchman
#95. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. Once the divinity of doctrine has been questioned there is no return to perfect faith.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#100. 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
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