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

Barbara W. Tuchman Famous Quotes & Sayings

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

They resented the patronage they depended upon.

The fact-finding mission was now the traditional Washington substitute for policy.

War is the unfolding of miscalculations.

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

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

Only the Church offered an organizing principle, which was the reason for its success, for society cannot bear anarchy.

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

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

were being ravaged by her brother. In their agreement Amadeus

Henry Adams, like most people, saw society in his own image.

Have we," he wondered, "conceived a merely human project and then imagined it to be a decree of the Almighty?

Every incident in the Old Testament was considered to pre-figure in allegory what was to come in the New.

Everything one has a right to do is not best to be done. Benjamin Franklin

[Books} are the bankers of the treasures of the mind.

The boy would learn to ride, to fight, and to hawk, the three chief physical elements of noble life,

Enormity of the stakes became the new self-hypnosis.

House speaker Thomas read could see the trend, but he could not have changed himself.

Connection was the cement of the governing class.

Inventive rhetoric is characteristic of true believers.

Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself.

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

The English patrician bloomed in his natural climate.

Smite a villein and he will bless you; bless a villein and he will smite you.

Puritanism, he said, was a reaction to the loss of moral fiber that accompanied the Renaissance.

The textile industry was the automobile industry of the Middle Ages,

the Archimedean point where the lever can be applied." At

Oversimplified perhaps, this in essence is the problem known to nineteenth-century diplomacy as the Eastern Question.

Because life was collective, it was intensely sociable and dependent on etiquette, hence the emphasis on courteous conduct and clean fingernails.

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.

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

Devout or not, all owned and carried Books of Hours, the characteristic fashionable religious possession of the 14th century noble.

Inevitably, as hatred of monarchy was added to hatred of episcopacy, they were led to republicanism.

The symbolism of the Garter, a circlet to bind the Knight-Companions mutually, and all of them jointly to the King as head of the Order.

The reality of a question is inevitably more complicated than we would like to suppose.

The love of humanity does not prevent us from being good journalists.

Depression and despair accompanied the physical symptoms, and before the end death is seen seated on the face.

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

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

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

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

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.

When a pope's election could not be explained rationally, it was attributed to the Holy Ghost.

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

The castle's predecessor, the Roman villa, had been unfortified, depending on Roman law and the Roman legions for its ramparts.

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

No one is so sure of his premises as the man who knows too little.

Our misconception in viewing the past lies in assuming that doubt and fear, permit, protests, violence and hate were not equally present.

For a knight to ride in a carriage was against the principles of chivalry and he never under any circumstances rode a mare.

He wanted AFFIRMATION rather than INFORMATION.

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

(Present-day anthropologists defend the thesis that the American Indians were in fact originally Mongolians who crossed over by the Bering Strait.)

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

Something in me broke and I was never the same thereafter.

Had all the world been a school and Wilson its principal, he would have been the greatest statesman in history.

By such accident of the human mind, war, trade, and history are shaped. The

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

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

Fireflies were the souls of unbaptized dead infants.

He had become, through a combination of heritage and character, a keeper of the national conscience.

Everything took on the color of blood.

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

The Republic cured me of the Republic.

Every repetition of the choice only hardened the issue.

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.

reproaches himself for recoiling from the stench of the poor and the sick,

In the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight

When those who have the title of shepherd play the part of wolves," said Lothar of Saxony, "heresy grows in the garden of the Church.

Washington's incessant need for NEW assessments testifies to uncertainty in the capital.

[T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death.

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

He had been present in their minds not as a man but as an idea.

Pessimism is a primary source of passivity,

The tribal pull of patriotism could have no better testimony.

The art of oratory was considered part of the equipment of a statesman.

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

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

No single characteristic ever overtakes an entire society.

Liberality in gifts and expenditure which, since his followers lived off it, was extolled as the most admired attribute of a noble.

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

One English nobleman and statesman read and reread a particular work of literature because it was the only book which allowed him to forget politics.

Nevertheless, Schlieffen decided, in the event of war, to attack France by way of Belgium.

He was always the bridge, between men as well as between ideas.

explicit communiqu

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.

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

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

Civilians who volunteer generally wish to escape, not to share, privatizations worse than their own.

Duty was not untinged by ambition.

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.

Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government.

Europe was a heap of swords piled as delicately as jackstraws; one could not be pulled out without moving the others. Under

I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning until the end.

He was always acting, always enveloping himself in artificiality, perhaps to conceal the volcano within.

Preconceived, fixed notions can be more damaging than cannon.

England's traditional tolerance was outraged at last.

How much does a man's effort depend upon the age in which his work is cast? Pope Clement VII

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

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

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

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.