Barbara W. Tuchman Quotes & Sayings

What is it about this book - essentially a military history of the first month of the First World War - which gives it its stamp and has created its enormous reputation? Four qualities stand out: a wealth of vivid detail which keeps the reader immersed in events, almost as an eyewitness; a prose style which is transparently clear, intelligent, controlled and witty; a cool detachment of moral judgment - Mrs. Tuchman is never preachy or reproachful; she draws on skepticism, not cynicism, leaving the reader not so much outraged by human villainy as amused and saddened by human folly. These first three qualities are present in all of Barbara Tuchman's work, but in The Guns of August there is a fourth which makes the book, once taken up, almost impossible to set aside. Remarkably, she persuades the reader to suspend any foreknowledge of what is about to happen. — Barbara W. Tuchman

The textile industry was the automobile industry of the Middle Ages, — Barbara W. Tuchman

Inventive rhetoric is characteristic of true believers. — Barbara W. Tuchman

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

Armed forces were no longer primarily feudal levies serving under a vassal's obligation who went home after forty days; they were recruited bodies who served for pay. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Nineteenth-century liberalism had assumed that man was a rational being who operated naturally according to his own best interests, so that in the end, what was reasonable would prevail. On this principle liberals defended extension of the suffrage toward the goal of one man, one vote. But a rise in literacy and in the right to vote, as the event proved, did nothing to increase common sense in politics. The mob that is moved by waving the bloody shirt, that decides elections in response to slogans - Free Silver, Hang the Kaiser, Two Cars in Every Garage - is not exhibiting any greater political sense than Marie Antoinette, who said, "Let them eat cake," or Caligula, who made his horse a consul. The common man proved no wiser than the decadent aristocrat. He has not shown in public affairs the innate wisdom which democracy presumed he possessed. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Planted firmly across the path of change, operating warily, shrewdly yet with passionate conviction in defence of the existing order, was a peer who was Chancellor of Oxford University for life, had twice held the India Office, twice the Foreign Office and was now Prime Minister for the third time. He was Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, Lord Salisbury, ninth Earl and third Marquess of his line. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Owing to the disabilities of the two major sovereigns, one incapacitated by alcohol and the other by insanity, the result was not what it might have been. Renewed madness was already darkening Charles's mind when he arrived and in the brief intervals when he was lucid, Wenceslas was drunk. — Barbara W. Tuchman

That conflict between the reach for the divine and the lure of earthly things was to be the central problem of the Middle Ages. — Barbara W. Tuchman

To those who think them selves strong, force always seems the easiest solution. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Nations, like people, are often more pragmatic than they know or can explain. — Barbara W. Tuchman

He was the most persuasive speaker, less for his words than character behind them. He made every listener feel he had done his best to master every aspect of this question, who has been driven by logic to arrive at certain conclusions, and who is disguising from us no argument on either side. — Barbara W. Tuchman

All this visible greatness was really one with Nineveh and Tyre. — Barbara W. Tuchman

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

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

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

Malignant phenomena do not come out of a golden age. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Medieval justice was scrupulous about holding proper trials and careful not to sentence without proof of guilt, but it achieved proof by confession rather than evidence, and confession was routinely obtained by torture. — Barbara W. Tuchman

He accomplished wonders of diplomacy on the principle, never give way, and never give offense. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. 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. This has led me to formulate Tuchman's Law, as follows: "The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold" (or any figure the reader would care to supply). — Barbara W. Tuchman

Books are ... companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of mind. Books are humanity in print. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Let us retreat when we can, not when we must. Lord Chatham — Barbara W. Tuchman

The Englishman, as an American observed, felt himself the best-governed citizen in the world, even when in opposition he believed the incumbents were ruining the country. — Barbara W. Tuchman

What other country has had the privilege of making the world's heart beat faster? — Barbara W. Tuchman

In a long and fiercely argued process, against the strenuous resistance of the peers, he ordered the Sire de Coucy to stand trial. Enguerrand IV was convicted, and although the King intended a death sentence, he was persuaded by the peers to forgo it. Enguerrand was sentenced to pay a fine of 12,000 livres, to be used partly to endow masses in perpetuity for the souls of the men he had hanged, and partly to be sent to Acre to aid in the defense of the Holy Land. Legal history was made and later cited as a factor in the canonization of the King. — Barbara W. Tuchman

He never hears the truth about himself by not wishing to hear it. Pope Alexander — Barbara W. Tuchman

The cutting off of Russia with all its consequences, the vain and sanguinary tragedy of Gallipoli, the diversion of Allied strength in the campaigns of Mesopotamia, Suez, and Palestine, the ultimate breakup of the Ottoman Empire, the subsequent history of the Middle East, followed from the voyage of the Goeben. Other — Barbara W. Tuchman

The tribal pull of patriotism could have no better testimony. — Barbara W. Tuchman

This was the Evangelical Revival that now began to take hold on the propertied class, who, frightened by what was happening in France, were anxiously mending their fences, spiritual as well as political. To escape rationalism's horrid daughter, revolution, they were only too willing to be enfolded in the anti-intellectual embrace of Evangelicalism, even if it demanded faith and good works and a willing suspension of disbelief. — Barbara W. Tuchman

The poorest man in his cottage may bid defiance to all the force of the Crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storms may enter; the rain may enter - but the King of England cannot enter; all his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement! — Barbara W. Tuchman

Party animosity was concealed under a veil of studied courtesy. — Barbara W. Tuchman

I command, or I keep quiet." Napoleon — Barbara W. Tuchman

Revolutions produce other men, not new men. Halfway between truth and endless error, the mold of the species is permanent. That is Earth's burden. — Barbara W. Tuchman

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

Of the two classes of Prussian officer, the bull-necked and the wasp-waisted, he belonged to the second. Monocled and effete in appearance, cold and distant in manner, he concentrated with such single-mindedness on his profession that when an aide, at the end of an all-night staff ride in East Prussia, pointed out to him the beauty of the river Pregel sparkling in the rising sun, the General gave a brief, hard look and replied, 'An unimportant obstacle. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Moltke closed upon that rigid phrase, the basis for every major German mistake, the phrase that launched the invasion of Belgium and the submarine war against the United States, the inevitable phrase when military plans dictate policy - and once settled it cannot be altered. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Without a country, you are the basket of humanity. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Had said, The greatest contribution Vietnam is making ... is developing an ability in the United States to fight a limited war, to go to war without arousing the public ire. — Barbara W. Tuchman

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

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

Society's revenge matched its fright. — Barbara W. Tuchman

The Pope replied, What can you preach to the people? If on humility, you yourselves are the proudest of the world, puffed up, pompous and sumptuous in luxuries. If on poverty, you are so covetous that all the benefices in the world are not enough for you. If on chastity - but we will be silent on this, for God knoweth what each man does and how many of you satisfy your lusts. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Humanizing war?! You may as well talk of humanizing Hell. Sir John Fisher — Barbara W. Tuchman

The English patrician bloomed in his natural climate. — Barbara W. Tuchman

The boy would learn to ride, to fight, and to hawk, the three chief physical elements of noble life, — Barbara W. Tuchman

What the Ambassador was witnessing - in idea, if not yet in fact - was the transfer of power from its arbitrary exercise by nobles and monarchs to power stationed in a constitution and in representation of the people. The period of the transfer, coinciding with his own career, from 1767 to 1797, — Barbara W. Tuchman

Isolation might be more hazardous than splendor. — Barbara W. Tuchman

No less a bold and pugnacious figure than Winston Churchill broke down and was unable to finish his remarks at the sendoff of the British Expeditionary Force into the maelstrom of World War I in Europe. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Every repetition of the choice only hardened the issue. — Barbara W. Tuchman

In proportion that property is small, the danger of misusing the franchisee is great. — Barbara W. Tuchman

These private wars were fought by the knights with furious gusto and a single strategy, which consisted in trying to ruin the enemy by killing or maiming as many of his peasants and destroying as many crops, vineyards, tools, barns, and other possessions as possible, thereby reducing his sources of revenue. As a result, the chief victim of the belligerents was their respective peasantry. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Political balance among the competing groups was unstable because the king had no permanent armed force at his command. — Barbara W. Tuchman

A historian cannot pick and choose his facts; he must deal with all the evidence. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Hours of the day were named for the hours of prayer: matins around midnight; lauds around three A.M.; prime, the first hour of daylight, at sunrise or about six A.M.; vespers at six in the evening; and compline at bedtime. — Barbara W. Tuchman

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

The feelings of the men who had raised Urban over their own heads probably cannot be adequately described. Some thought that the delirium of power had made the Pope furiosus et melaneholicus - in short, mad. — Barbara W. Tuchman

A great imperative imparts a wonderful impulse to the spirit. — Barbara W. Tuchman

The early removal from school of future officers of Britain's seapower, leaving them unacquainted with the subject matter and ideas of the distant and recent past, may account for the incapacity of no military thinking in a world that devoted itself to military action. With little thought of strategy, no study of the theory of war or of planned objective, war's glorious art may have been glorious, but with individual exceptions, it was more or less mindless. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy. — Barbara W. Tuchman

The writer's object should be to hold the reader's attention. I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning until the end. This is accomplished only when the narrative moves steadily ahead, not when it comes to a weary standstill, overloaded with every item uncovered in the research. — Barbara W. Tuchman

History was finite and contained within comprehensible limits. It began with the Creation and was scheduled to end in a not indefinitely remote future with the Second Coming, which was the hope of afflicted mankind, followed by the Day of Judgment. Within that span, man was not subject to social or moral progress because his goal was the next world, not betterment in this. In this world he was assigned to ceaseless struggle against himself in which he might attain individual progress and even victory, but collective betterment would only come in the final union with God. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Books are humanity in print. — Barbara W. Tuchman

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

The blood libel took possession of the popular mind most rabidly in Germany, where the well-poisoning charge too had originated in the 12th century. — Barbara W. Tuchman

They resented the patronage they depended upon. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Money was evil, beauty vain, and both were transitory. Ambition was pride, desire for gain was avarice, desire of the flesh was lust, desire for honor, even for knowledge and beauty, was vainglory. Insofar as these diverted man from seeking the life of the spirit, they were sinful. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Each one of us is serious individually, but together we become frivolous. — Barbara W. Tuchman

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

His one essay in love had exhausted his powers in that direction. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Henry Adams, like most people, saw society in his own image. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Bull of September 1348 in which he said that Christians who imputed the pestilence to the Jews had been "seduced by that liar, the Devil," and that the charge of well-poisoning and ensuing massacres were a "horrible thing." He pointed out that "by a mysterious decree of God" the plague was afflicting all peoples, including Jews; that it raged in places where no Jews lived, and that elsewhere they were victims like everyone else; therefore the charge that they caused it was "without plausibility." He urged the clergy to take Jews under their protection as he himself offered to do in Avignon, but his voice was hardly heard against local animus. — Barbara W. Tuchman

In the woe of the century no factor caused more trouble than the persistent lag between the growth of the state and the means of state financing. While centralized government was developing, taxation was still encased in the concept that taxes represented an emergency measure requiring consent. — Barbara W. Tuchman

A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests. Mankind, it seems, makes a poorer performance of government than of almost any other human activity. In this sphere, wisdom, which may be defined as the exercise of judgment acting on experience, common sense and available information, is less operative and more frustrated than it should be. Why do holders of high office so often act contrary to the way reason points and enlightened self-interest suggests? Why does intelligent mental process seem so often not to function? — Barbara W. Tuchman

One Cardinal entered his cathedral for the first time at his funeral. — Barbara W. Tuchman

It was manifest that a malady of such horrors, stenches, and agonies, and especially one bringing the dismal despair that settled upon its victims before they died, was not a plague "natural" to mankind but "a chastisement from Heaven. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Once people envisioned the possibility of change in a fixed order, the end of an age of submission came in sight; the turn to individual conscience lay ahead. To that extent the Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man. — Barbara W. Tuchman

No single characteristic ever overtakes an entire society. — Barbara W. Tuchman

The clergy were to pray for all men, the knight to fight for them, and the commoner to work that all might eat. — Barbara W. Tuchman

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

He wanted AFFIRMATION rather than INFORMATION. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Fear of God is thrown away," lamented Brigitta in Rome, "and in its place is a bottomless bag of money." All the Ten Commandments, she said, had been reduced to one: "Bring hither the money. — Barbara W. Tuchman

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

The succession multiplied the harm. Each passed on his conception of the papacy unchanged. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Guides were Franciscan monks, sole custodians of the holy places after 1230, who recited the history and traditions associated with each town or monument or site of Biblical events to parties of visitors as they arrived. More — Barbara W. Tuchman

If he had a little more brains he would be a half-wit. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Character is fate, the Greeks believed. A hundred years of German philosophy went into the making of this decision in which the seed of self-destruction lay embedded, waiting for its hour. The voice was Schlieffen's, but the hand was the hand of Fichte who saw the German people chosen by Providence to occupy the supreme place in the history of the universe, of Hegel who saw them leading the world to a glorious destiny of compulsory Kultur, of Nietzsche who told them that Supermen were above ordinary controls, of Treitschke who set the increase of power as the highest moral duty of the state, of the whole German people, who called their temporal ruler the "All-Highest." What made the Schlieffen plan was not Clausewitz and the Battle of Cannae, but the body of accumulated egoism which suckled the German people and created a nation fed on "the desperate delusion of the will that deems itself absolute." The — Barbara W. Tuchman

Thereafter the red edges of war spread over another half of the world. Turkey's neighbors, Bulgaria, Rumania, Italy, and Greece, were eventually drawn in. Thereafter, with her exit to the Mediterranean closed, Russia was left dependent on Archangel, icebound half the year, and on Vladivostok, 8,000 miles from the battlefront. With the Black Sea closed, her exports dropped by 98 per cent and her imports by 95 per cent. The cutting off of Russia with all its consequences, the vain and sanguinary tragedy of Gallipoli, the diversion of Allied strength in the campaigns of Mesopotamia, Suez, and Palestine, the ultimate breakup of the Ottoman Empire, the subsequent history of the Middle East, followed from the voyage of the Goeben. — Barbara W. Tuchman

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

The affair made men feel larger than life. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Philip was fascinated by the all-absorbing question of the Beatific Vision: whether the souls of the blessed see the face of God immediately upon entering Heaven or whether they have to wait until the Day of Judgment. — Barbara W. Tuchman

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

Any person who considers himself, and intends to remain, a member of Western society inherits the Western past from Athens and Jerusalem to Runnymede and Valley Forge, as well as to Watts and Chicago of August 1968. He may ignore it or deny it, but that does not alter the fact. The past sits back and smiles and knows it owns him anyway. — Barbara W. Tuchman

No one is is sure of his premise as the man who knows too little. — Barbara W. Tuchman

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

The fate of warnings in political affairs is to be futile when the recipient wishes otherwise. — Barbara W. Tuchman

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

The plague was not the kind of calamity that inspired mutual help. Its loathsomeness and deadliness did not herd people together in mutual distress, but only prompted their desire to escape each other. — Barbara W. Tuchman

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

At Coucy's level, men and women hawked and hunted and carried a favorite falcon, hooded, on the wrist wherever they went, indoors or out - to church, to the assizes, to meals. On occasion, huge pastries were served from which live birds were released to be caught by hawks unleashed in the banquet — Barbara W. Tuchman

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