Barbara Tuchman quotes - page 2

In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record. (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. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
Economic man and sensual man are not suppressible. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
What counts is not so much the fact as what the public perceives to be the fact. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history's clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
The writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
Human beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot. (Barbara Tuchman)
To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning until the end. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
As the era of the sword was ending, that of firearms began, in time to allow no lapse in man's belligerent capacity. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
The system was aided by the Church, whose natural interests allied it more to the great than to the meek. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
Survivors of the plague, finding themselves neither destroyed nor improved, could discover no Divine purpose in the pain they had suffered. God's purposes were usually mysterious, but this scourge had been too terrible to be accepted without questioning. If a disaster of such magnitude, the most lethal ever known, was a mere wanton act of God or perhaps not God's work at all, then the absolutes of a fixed order were loosed from their moorings. Minds that opened to admit these questions could never again be shut. 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. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
Perhaps by this time the 14th century was not quite sane. If enlightened self-interest is the criterion of sanity, in the verdict of Michelet, "no epoch was more naturally mad.”. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
Books are the carriers of civilization... They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
On being shown a relic said to be a bone of St. Elizabeth, he (Sigismund) turned it over and remarked that it could just as well be that of a dead cobbler. (Barbara Tuchman)
The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
Left to face a hungry winter robbed of their hard-earned harvests, the people experienced their own warrior class not as protectors but ravagers. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
When reproached for spending too much time with books and clerks, Charles answered, "As long as knowledge is honored in this country, so long will it prosper.”. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
Against men habituated to lawless force, violent punishment failed to bring the violence under control. View quote
Barbara Tuchman