Barbara W. Tuchman: Quotes about age

Barbara W. Tuchman was American historian and author. Explore interesting quotes on age.
Barbara W. Tuchman: 90 quotes3 likes

“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

“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

“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

“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