Barbara W. Tuchman Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Barbara W. Tuchman
Barbara W. Tuchman Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Barbara W. Tuchman on Wise Famous Quotes.
Only the Church offered an organizing principle, which was the reason for its success, for society cannot bear anarchy.
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.
The boy would learn to ride, to fight, and to hawk, the three chief physical elements of noble life,
Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
(Present-day anthropologists defend the thesis that the American Indians were in fact originally Mongolians who crossed over by the Bering Strait.)
Had all the world been a school and Wilson its principal, he would have been the greatest statesman in history.
Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex.
He had become, through a combination of heritage and character, a keeper of the national conscience.
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.
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.
[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
Mankind's tragedy is that he can draw up blueprints for a better life but he cannot live up to them.
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.
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.
Civilians who volunteer generally wish to escape, not to share, privatizations worse than their own.
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.
Europe was a heap of swords piled as delicately as jackstraws; one could not be pulled out without moving the others. Under
He was always acting, always enveloping himself in artificiality, perhaps to conceal the volcano within.