Tuchman Quotes

Duty was not untinged by ambition. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

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

Every incident in the Old Testament was considered to pre-figure in allegory what was to come in the New. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

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

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

England's traditional tolerance was outraged at last. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

When the children were very small, I worked in the morning only, and then gradually, as they spent full days at school, I could spend full days at work. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

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

He had the ruthlessness of uninterrupted success. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

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

German soldiers, posted as informers, were found dressed as peasants, even as peasant women. The latter were discovered, presumably in the course of non-military action, by their government issued underwear; but many were probably never caught, it being impossible, General Gourko regretfully admitted, to lift the skirts of every female in East Prussia. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Even the respectable have a small anarchist hidden on the inside. ~ 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

House speaker Thomas read could see the trend, but he could not have changed himself. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

In writing I am seduced by the sound of words and by the interaction of their sound and sense. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

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

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

Cornwallis was a man who could have thrust his hand in a flame if necessary, but not a man to organize the logistics and arrangements of a large campaign with a likely risk of failure. The smooth face in the Gainsborough portrait with no lines of thought or of frowns or of laughter - with no lines at all - tells as much. It is a face composed by a life of comfort and satisfaction without any need of desperate attempts. As ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

He said that whatever the outcome in America, he would always regard it as a glory and honor to have upheld the cause which he regarded as that of all humankind. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

If a man is a writer, everybody tiptoes around past the locked door of the breadwinner. But if you're an ordinary female housewife, people say, 'This is just something Barbara wanted to do; it's not professional.' ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

A regular method was the levy for a crusade, which allowed ecclesiastical income within each country to be taxed by its king, who soon came to regard it as a right. ~ Barbara W. 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

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

The proud tower built up through the great age of European civilization was an edifice of grandeur and passion, of riches and beauty and dark cellars. Its inhabitants lived, as compared to a later time, with more self-reliance, more confidence, more hope; greater magnificence, extravagance and elegance; more careless ease, more gaiety, more pleasure in each other's company and conversation, more injustice and hypocrisy, more misery and want, more sentiment including false sentiment, less sufferance of mediocrity, more dignity in work, more delight in nature, more zest. The Old World had much that has since been lost, whatever may have been gained. Looking back on it from 1915, Emile Verhaeren, the Belgian Socialist poet, dedicated his pages, With emotion, to the man I used to be. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Impunity in such affairs was no longer a matter of course, for the King was Louis IX, a sovereign whose sense of rulership was equal to his piety. ~ Barbara W. 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

Above all, discard the irrelevant. ~ Barbara Tuchman

SOME DAMNED FOOLISH THING in the Balkans, Bismarck had predicted, would ignite the next war. The assassination of the Austrian heir apparent, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, by Serbian nationalists on June 28, 1914, satisfied his condition. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

The cry of "Traitor!" was not a local voice only, but a bewildered people's explanation of the inexplicable. It was the eternal cry of conspiracy, of stab in the back. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Depression and despair accompanied the physical symptoms, and before the end death is seen seated on the face. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

His decision suggests that an absence of overriding personal ambition together with shrewd common sense are among the essential components of wisdom. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Its Seventh Commandment, italicized by the authors, stated: Battles are beyond everything else struggles of morale. Defeat is inevitable as soon as the hope of conquering ceases to exist. Success comes not to him who has suffered the least but to him whose will is firmest and morale strongest. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

The fief of Coucy from the Church; it was now held directly of the King, and its seigneur paid homage only to the King's person. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Belgium, where there occurred one of the rare appearances of the hero in history, was lifted above herself by the uncomplicated conscience of her King and, faced with the choice to acquiesce or resist, took less than three hours to make her decision, knowing it might be mortal. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

No single characteristic ever overtakes an entire society. ~ 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

Pessimism is a primary source of passivity, ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

The greatness of the object enabled my mind to support what my strengths of body was scarce equal to. ~ Barbara W. 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

He said, McKinley was going around the country shouting prosperity when there was no prosperity for the poor man. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Diplomacy's primary law: LEAVE ROOM FOR NEGOTIATION. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Contradictory conditions are always present. Evidence ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

When beggars die there are no comets seen; The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

For most people reform meant relief from ecclesiastical extortions. ~ 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

Canada was regarded as a hostage to restrain Britain, ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

How much does a man's effort depend upon the age in which his work is cast? Pope Clement VII ~ 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

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

Devout or not, all owned and carried Books of Hours, the characteristic fashionable religious possession of the 14th century noble. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

In the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight ~ 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

In many guilds artisans struck for higher pay and shorter hours. In an age when social conditions were regarded as fixed, such action was revolutionary. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Advice to young Samuel Gompers that might apply in many other areas: Learn from socialism, but don't join it. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

To establish despotism over such a mighty nation must be vain, must be fatal. We shall be forced ultimately to retreat: let us retreat when we can, not when we must. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

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

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

Far from a source of suffering, their adopted faith had been a source of power. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

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

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

Every repetition of the choice only hardened the issue. ~ 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

Medieval illustrations show people in every other human activity-making love and dying, sleeping and eating, in bed and in the bath, praying, hunting, dancing, plowing, in games and in combat, trading, traveling, reading and writing - yet so rarely with children as to raise the question: Why not? Maternal love, like sex, is generally considered too innate to be eradicable, but perhaps under certain unfavorable conditions it may atrophy. Owing to the high infant mortality of the times, estimated at one or two in three, the investment of love in a young child may have been so unrewarding that by some ruse of nature, as when overcrowded rodents in captivity will not breed, it was suppressed. Perhaps also the frequent childbearing put less value on the product. A child was born and died and another took its place. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Kitchener up to London, but could not yet nerve himself ~ 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

The fact-finding mission was now the traditional Washington substitute for policy. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

An event of great agony is bearable only in the belief that it will bring about a better world. When it does not, as in the aftermath of another vast calamity in 1914-18, disillusion is deep and moves on to self-doubt and self-disgust. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Not a passing phenomenon nor an external force, the companies had become a way of life, a part of society itself, used and joined by its rulers even as they struggled to throw them off. They ate at society from within like Erysichthon, the "tearer up of earth," who, having destroyed the trees in the sacred grove of Demeter, was cursed by the goddess with an insatiable appetite and finally devoured himself attempting to satisfy his hunger. Discipline ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Those deterrents - the brotherhood of socialists, the interlocking of finance, commerce, and other economic factors - which had been expected to make war impossible failed to function when the time came. Nationhood, like a wild gust of wind, arose and swept them aside. People ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

To think meant to give room for freedom of initiative, for the imponderable to win over the material, for will to demonstrate its power over circumstance. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

The writer of history, I believe, has a number of duties vis-à-vis the reader, if he wants to keep him reading. The first is to distill. He must do the preliminary work for the reader, assemble the information, make sense of it, select the essential, discard the irrelevant- above all, discard the irrelevant - and put the rest together so that it forms a developing dramatic narrative. Narrative, it has been said , is the lifeblood of history. To offer a mass of undigested facts, of names not identified and places not located, is of no use to the reader and is simple laziness on the part of the author, or pedantry to show how much he has read. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

The castle's predecessor, the Roman villa, had been unfortified, depending on Roman law and the Roman legions for its ramparts. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Our misconception in viewing the past lies in assuming that doubt and fear, permit, protests, violence and hate were not equally present. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

What proportion of the peasantry was well off and what poor is judged by what they bequeathed, and since the poorest had nothing to leave, they remain mute. For no other class is that famous goal of the historian, wie es wirklich war (how it really was), so elusive. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

He was always the bridge, between men as well as between ideas. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

[T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

If there have been mute inglorious Miltons in rural villages, presumably there have been unrealized Washingtons born in unpropitious times. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

The history of the Jews is…intensely peculiar in the fact of having given the Western world its concept of origins and monotheism, its ethical traditions, and the founder of its prevailing religion, yet suffering dispersion, statelessness, and ceaseless persecution, and finally in our times nearly successful genocide, dramatically followed by fulfillment of the never-relinquished ream of return to their homeland. Viewing this strange and singular history one can not escape the impression that it must contain some special significance for the history of mankind, that in some way, whether one believes in divine purpose or inscrutable circumstance, the Jews have been singled out to carry the tale of human fate. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Rule was still personal, deriving from the fief of land and oath of homage. Not citizen to state but vassal to lord was the bond that underlay political structure. ~ Barbara W. 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

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

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

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

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

So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun. After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens - four dowager and three regnant - and a scattering of special ambassadors from uncrowned countries. Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last. 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

Something in me broke and I was never the same thereafter. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

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

The seven "liberal arts": Grammar, the foundation of science; Logic, which differentiates the true from the false; Rhetoric, the source of law; Arithmetic, the foundation of order because "without numbers there is nothing"; Geometry, the science of measurement; Astronomy, the most noble of the sciences because it is connected with Divinity and Theology; and lastly Music. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

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

Everything interested him and everything excited him. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

The thing you contend for to be reason," Burke had said, "show it to be common sense, show it to be the means of attaining some useful end, and then I am content to allow it what dignity you please. ~ 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

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

The cracking of old and famous structures is slow and internal, while the facade holds. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

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

explicit communiqu ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

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