Barbara Tuchman Quotes & Sayings

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

No economic activity was more irrepressible [in the 14th century] than the investment and lending at interest of money; it was the basis for the rise of the Western capitalist economy and the building of private fortunes-and it was based on the sin of usury. — Barbara Tuchman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bureaucracy, safely repeating today what it did yesterday, rolls on as ineluctably as some vast computer, which, once penetrated by error, duplicates it forever. — Barbara Tuchman

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

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

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

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

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

In April 1917 the illusion of isolation was destroyed, America came to the end of innocence, and of the exuberant freedom of bachelor independence. That the responsibilities of world power have not made us happier is no surprise. To help ourselves manage them, we have replaced the illusion of isolation with a new illusion of omnipotence. — Barbara Tuchman

The Church [in the 14th century] gave ceremony and dignity to lives that had little of either. It was the source of beauty and art to which all had some access and which many helped to create. — Barbara Tuchman

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

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

It hurt the economic historians, the Marxists and the fabians, to admit that the Ten Hour Bill, the basic piece of 19th century legislation, came down from the top, out of aa nobleman's private feelings about the Gospel, or that the abolition of the slave trade was achieved, not through the operation of some "law" of profit and loss, but peurlet as the result of tyhe new humanitarianism of the Evangelicals. — Barbara Tuchman

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

His (Deschamps') complaint of court life was the same as is made of government at the top in any age: it was composed of hypocrisy, flattery, lying, paying and betraying; it was where calumny and cupidity reigned, common sense lacked, truth dared not appear, and where to survive one had to be deaf, blind, and dumb. — Barbara Tuchman

Misgovernment is of four kinds, often in combination. They are: 1) tyranny or oppression, of which history provides so many well-known examples that they do not need citing; 2) excessive ambition, such as Athens' attempted conquest of Sicily in the Peloponnesian War, Philip II's of England via the Armada, Germany's twice-attempted rule of Europe by a self-conceived master race, Japan's bid for an empire of Asia; 3) incompetence or decadence, as in the case of the late Roman empire, the last Romanovs and the last imperial dynasty of China; and finally 4) folly or perversity. — Barbara Tuchman

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

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

I ask myself, have nations ever declined from a loss of moral sense rather than from physical reasons or the pressure of barbarians? I think that they have. — Barbara Tuchman

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

After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening, on a lucky day, without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. — Barbara Tuchman

Satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality. — Barbara Tuchman

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

Completeness is rare in history ... — Barbara Tuchman

Above all, discard the irrelevant. — Barbara Tuchman

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

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

In the search for meaning we must not forget that the gods (or God, for that matter) are a concept of the human mind; they are the creatures of man, not vice versa. They are needed and invented to give meaning and purpose to the struggle that is life on Earth, to explain strange and irregular phenomena of nature, haphazard events and, above all, irrational human conduct. They exist to bear the burden of all things that cannot be comprehended except by supernatural intervention or design. — Barbara Tuchman

In a country where misery and want were the foundation of the social structure, famine was periodic, death from starvation common, disease pervasive, thievery normal, and graft and corruption taken for granted, the elimination of these conditions in Communist China is so striking that negative aspects of the new rule fade in relative importance. — Barbara Tuchman

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

No nation in the world has so many drastic problems squeezed into so small a space, under such urgent pressure of time and heavy burden of history, as Israel. — Barbara Tuchman

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

The open frontier, the hardships of homesteading from scratch, the wealth of natural resources, the whole vast challenge of a continent waiting to be exploited, combined to produce a prevailing materialism and an American drive bent as much, if not more, on money, property, and power than was true of the Old World from which we had fled. — Barbara Tuchman

The ills and disorders of the 14th century could not be without consequence. Times were to grow worse over the next fifty-odd years until at some imperceptible moment, by the some mysterious chemistry, energies were refreshed, ideas broke out of the mold of the Middle Ages into new realms, and humanity found itself redirected. — Barbara Tuchman

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

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

It is wiser, I believe, to arrive at theory by way of evidence rather than the other way around ... It is more rewarding, in any case, to assemble the facts first and, in the process of arranging them in narrative form, to discover a theory or a historical generalization emerging of its own accord. — Barbara Tuchman

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

The Germans could not get over the perfidy of it. It was unbelievable that the English, having degenerated to the stage where suffragettes heckled the Prime Minister and defied the police, were going to fight. — Barbara Tuchman

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

Policy is formed by preconceptions, by long implanted biases. When information is relayed to policy-makers, they respond in terms of what is already inside their heads and consequently make policy less to fit the facts than to fit the notions and intentions formed out of the mental baggage that has accumulated in their minds since childhood. — Barbara Tuchman

While husbands and lovers in the stories [of the 14th century] are of all kinds, ranging from sympathetic to disgusting, women are invariably deceivers: inconstant, unscrupulous, quarrelsome, querulous, lecherous, shameless, although not necessarily all of these at once. — Barbara Tuchman

The power to command frequently causes failure to think. — Barbara Tuchman

Modern historians have suggested that in his last years he (Richard II) was overtaken by mental disease, but that is only a modern view of the malfunction common to 14th century rulers: inability to inhibit impulse. — Barbara Tuchman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In America, where the electoral process is drowning in commercial techniques of fund-raising and image-making, we may have completed a circle back to a selection process as unconcerned with qualifications as that which made Darius King of Persia ... he whose horse was the first to neigh at sunrise should be King. — Barbara Tuchman

If all were equalized by death, as the medieval idea constantly emphasized, was it not possible that inequalities on earth were contrary to the will of God? — Barbara Tuchman

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. — Barbara Tuchman

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

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

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

In the midst of events there is no perspective. — Barbara Tuchman

Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible. — Barbara Tuchman

Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence. It is no fun to write lumpishly, dully, in prose the reader must plod through like wet sand. But it is a pleasure to achieve, if one can, a clear running prose that is simple yet full of surprises. This does not just happen. It requires skill, hard work, a good ear, and continued practice. — Barbara Tuchman

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

The nastiness of women [in the 14th century] was generally perceived at the close of life when a man began to worry about hell, and his sexual desire in any case fading. — Barbara Tuchman

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

Diplomacy means all the wicked devices of the Old World, spheres of influence, balances of power, secret treaties, triple alliances, and, during the interim period, appeasement of Fascism. — Barbara Tuchman

Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled. — Barbara Tuchman

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

To ensure that no one gained an advantage over anyone else, commercial law [in the 14th century] prohibited innovation in tools or techniques, underselling below a fixed price, working late by artificial light, employing extra apprentices or wife and underage children, and advertising of wares or praising them to the detriment of others. — Barbara Tuchman

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

For most people reform meant relief from ecclesiastical extortions. — Barbara Tuchman

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

Human behavior is timeless. — Barbara Tuchman

Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts. — Barbara Tuchman

To rush in upon an event before its significance has had time to separate from the surrounding circumstances may be enterprising, but is it useful? ... The recent prevalence of these hot histories on publishers' lists raises the question: Should - or perhaps can - history be written while it is still smoking? — Barbara Tuchman

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

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

Of all the ills that our poor ... society is heir to, the focal one, it seems to me, from which so much of our uneasiness and confusion derive, is the absence of standards. — Barbara Tuchman

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

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