Top 100 Tuchman Quotes
#1. She (historian Barbara Tuchman) draws on skepticism, not cynicism, leaving the reader not so much outraged by human ability as amused and saddened by human folly.
Robert K. Massie
#3. 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
#5. The power to command frequently causes failure to think.
Barbara Tuchman
#6. If there have been mute inglorious Miltons in rural villages, presumably there have been unrealized Washingtons born in unpropitious times.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. Books are ... companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of mind. Books are humanity in print.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#10. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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. 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
#15. These cumbersome vehicles were as convenient as if dinosaurs had survived to be used by cowboys for driving cattle
Barbara W. Tuchman
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. Proper society did not think about MAKING money, only about spending it.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#20. The cracking of old and famous structures is slow and internal, while the facade holds.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#23. 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
#24. The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#26. What other country has had the privilege of making the world's heart beat faster?
Barbara W. Tuchman
#27. Advice to young Samuel Gompers that might apply in many other areas: Learn from socialism, but don't join it.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#28. 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
#29. Awful momentum makes carrying through easier than calling off folly.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#30. The utility of perseverance in absurdity is more than I could ever discern. Edmund Burke
Barbara W. Tuchman
#31. It is necessary to salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman pontiff.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#32. 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
#33. He believed interim reforms were necessary in order to fix the worker for his destiny.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. Now according to German logic, a declaration of war was found to be unnecessary because of imaginary bombings
Barbara W. Tuchman
#38. Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.
Barbara Tuchman
#39. Talent for oratory can simulate the need for action and even thought.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#40. 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
#41. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.
Barbara Tuchman
#46. 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
#47. He seemed less in need of a secretary than of someone to listen to him.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#48. 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
#50. 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
#53. 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
#55. He never hears the truth about himself by not wishing to hear it. Pope Alexander
Barbara W. Tuchman
#56. 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
#57. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#67. Nations, like people, are often more pragmatic than they know or can explain.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#68. 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
#70. Britain had an air of careless supremacy which GALLED her neighbors.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#71. 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
#72. When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.
Barbara Tuchman
#73. Despised as ineffective, they were ineffective because they were despised.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#74. In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#75. I have always been in a condition in which I cannot not write.
Barbara Tuchman
#76. 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
#77. The symptoms of depression, despair or melancholy, and lethargy were considered by the Church the sin of accidia or sloth.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#79. 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
#80. 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
#82. The writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#84. 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
#85. The limitation prompting folly was an attitude of superiority so dense as to be impenetrable.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#86. A minister's (cabinet member's) function was not to DO the work but to see that it got done.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#87. Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
Barbara Tuchman
#88. Woman [in the 14th century] was the Church's rival, the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the Devil's decoy.
Barbara Tuchman
#89. 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
#90. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.
Barbara Tuchman
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. Why, since folly or perversity is expected of individuals, should we expect anything else from government?
Barbara W. Tuchman
#94. 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
#95. the Regents' dislike of the social "leveling" they sensed in the Revolution was stronger.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
