Barbara Tuchman Quotes - Page 4

Diplomacy means all the wicked devices of the Old World, spheres of influence, balances of power, secret treaties, triple alliances, and, during the interim period, appeasement of Fascism.

Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip.

The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.

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

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

I have always felt like an artist when I work on a book. I see no reason why the word should always be confined to writers of fiction and poetry.

satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.

I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning to the end.

Historians who stuff in every item of research they have found, every shoelace and telephone call of a biographical subject, are not doing the hard work of selecting and shaping a readable story.

I have always been in a condition in which I cannot not write.

No nation in the world has so many drastic problems squeezed into so small a space, under such urgent pressure of time and heavy burden of history, as Israel.

The fact of being reported increases the apparent extent of a deplorable development by a factor of ten.

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.

Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.

For most people reform meant relief from ecclesiastical extortions.

To ensure that no one gained an advantage over anyone else, commercial law prohibited innovation in tools or techniques, underselling below a fixed price, working late by artificial light, employing extra apprentices or wife and under-age children, and advertising of wares or praising them to the detriment of others.

More than a code of manners in war and love, Chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life.

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

The Church [in the 14th century] gave ceremony and dignity to lives that had little of either. It was the source of beauty and art to which all had some access and which many helped to create.

The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.

For me, the card catalog has been a companion all my working life. To leave it is like leaving the house one was brought up in.

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

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.

Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers - danger, death, and live ammunition.

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