Barbara W. Tuchman Quotes (45 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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A Distant Mirror

Barbara W. Tuchman

The Guns of August

Barbara W. Tuchman

Barbara W. Tuchman: 45 quotes 3 likes

Famous Barbara W. Tuchman Quotes

“History is the unfolding of miscalculations.”

Barbara W. Tuchman

Stilwell and the American Experience in China, p. 132 (1970)

“Human beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot.”

Barbara W. Tuchman

Source: A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“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 book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 6

“Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book The Guns of August

Source: The Guns of August

“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.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book The Guns of August

Source: The Guns of August

“Books are the carriers of civilization… They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.”

Barbara W. Tuchman

Variant: Books are... companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of mind. Books are humanity in print.

Barbara W. Tuchman Quotes about time

“As the era of the sword was ending, that of firearms began, in time to allow no lapse in man’s belligerent capacity.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 585

“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 W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 581

“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.””

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 332

“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.””

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 239

“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"”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

or any figure the reader would care to supply
Source: A Distant Mirror (1978)

Barbara W. Tuchman Quotes about war

“The real reason for his attitude lay deeper. Essentially, Gloucester and the barons of his party were opposed to peace because they felt war to be their occupation. Behind them were the poorer knights and squires and archers of England, who, unconcerned with rights or wrongs, were “inclined to war such as had been their livelihood.””

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 490

“The Hundred Years' War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 594

“Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 389

“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 W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 412

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

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 81

Barbara W. Tuchman Quotes

“Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced”

Barbara W. Tuchman

Learning

“If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Jean Gerson, quoted on p. 520
A Distant Mirror (1978)

“The emphasis on sorcery reflected accusations by the authorities more than it did actual practice. Being threatened, the Church responded by virulent persecution.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 590

“Against men habituated to lawless force, violent punishment failed to bring the violence under control.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 273

Men

“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 W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 542

Dead

“In the midst of events there is no perspective.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 454

“For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 426

“Left to face a hungry winter robbed of their hard-earned harvests, the people experienced their own warrior class not as protectors but ravagers.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 141

People , Winter

“Whatever solace the Christian faith could give was balanced by the anxiety it generated.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 469

Faith

“In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 210

“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 W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 450

Life , Truth , Age , Lying

“Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex. As long as combat was desirable as the source of honor and glory, the knight had no wish to share it with the commoner, even for the sake of success.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 577

Sex , Success

“What counts is not so much the fact as what the public perceives to be the fact.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 291

“Nothing is more certain than death and nothing uncertain but its hour.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Enguerrand VII de Coucy, quoted on p. 570
A Distant Mirror (1978)

Death

“When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Admiral Jean de Vienne, quoted on p. 559
A Distant Mirror (1978)

Truth

“Voluntary self-directed religion was more dangerous to the Church than any number of infidels.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 487

Religion

“Governments do not like to face radical remedies; it is easier to let politics predominate.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 523

“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 W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 375

Death , God , Idea

“To admit error and cut losses is rare among individuals, unknown among states.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 459

Error , Loss

“When commerce with Moslems flourished, zeal for their massacre declined.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 202

“Economic man and sensual man are not suppressible.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. xix

“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 W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 534

Disease

“The system was aided by the Church, whose natural interests allied it more to the great than to the meek.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 173

Nature

“Doctrine tied itself into infinite knots over the realities of sex.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 213

Sex , Reality

“To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 399

“What is government but an arrangement by which the many accept the authority of the few?”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 455

“Chroniclers habitually matched numbers to the awesomeness of the event.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 554

“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.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 123

Death , God , Pain , People

“For most people reform meant relief from ecclesiastical extortions.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 327

People

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