Barbara Tuchman quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Barbara Tuchman

Barbara Tuchman Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Barbara Tuchman on Wise Famous Quotes.

No female iniquity was more severely condemned [in the 14th century] than the habit of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten the forehead.

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.

For most people reform meant relief from ecclesiastical extortions.

To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.

When people don't have an objective, there's much less dynamic effort, and that makes life a lot less interesting.

The conduct of war was so much more interesting than its prevention.

Human behavior is timeless.

Wisdom - meaning judgment acting on experience, common sense, available knowledge, and a decent appreciation of probability.

Above all, discard the irrelevant.

Governments do not like to face radical remedies; it is easier to let politics predominate.

The fact of being reported increases the apparent extent of a deplorable development by a factor of ten.

The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.

If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements,corrupts even more.

In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.

To be a bestseller is not necessarily a measure of quality, but it is a measure of communication.

Words are seductive and dangerous material, to be used with caution.

Whatever solace the Christian faith could give was balanced by the anxiety it generated.

Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.

If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.

Satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.

To put away one's own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.

One must stop conducting research before one has finished. Otherwise, one will never stop and never finish.

Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.

The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.

When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.

The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians ...

An essential element for good writing is a good ear: One must listen to the sound of one's own prose.

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.

Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip.

To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.

The better part of valor is to spend it learning to live with differences, however hostile, unless and until we can find another planet.

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.

Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.

In the midst of events there is no perspective.

If wisdom in government eludes us, perhaps courage could substitute-the moral courage to terminate mistakes.

Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.

Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.

Completeness is rare in history ...

I have always been in a condition in which I cannot not write.

The power to command frequently causes failure to think.

When commerce with Moslems flourished, zeal for their massacre declined.

Woman [in the 14th century] was the Church's rival, the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the Devil's decoy.

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.

Government remains the paramount area of folly because it is there that men seek power over others - only to lose it over themselves.

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.

Russians, in the knowledge of inexhaustible supplies of manpower, are accustomed to accepting gigantic fatalities with comparative calm.

No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.

More than a code of manners in war and love, Chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life ...

Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.

Voluntary self-directed religion was more dangerous to the Church than any number of infidels.

The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard.

Doctrine tied itself into infinite knots over the realities of sex.

The Hundred Years' War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity.

Friendship of a kind that cannot easily be reversed tomorrow must have its roots in common interests and shared beliefs.

Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.