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Barbara W. Tuchman Quotes
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Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip and Germans, no less than other peoples, prepare for the last war.
Barbara W. Tuchman
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To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.
Barbara W. Tuchman
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Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
Barbara W. Tuchman
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Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
Barbara W. Tuchman
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Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as the most flagrant of all the passions.
Barbara W. Tuchman
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Nothing is more certain than death and nothing uncertain but its hour.
Barbara W. Tuchman
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Confronted by menace, or what is perceived as menace, governments will usually attempt to smash it, rarely to examine it, understand it, define it.
Barbara W. Tuchman
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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
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If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements, corrupts even more.
Barbara W. Tuchman
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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
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Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.
Barbara W. Tuchman
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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.
Barbara W. Tuchman
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One constant among the elements of 1914—as of any era—was the disposition of everyone on all sides not to prepare for the harder alternative, not to act upon what they suspected to be true.
Barbara W. Tuchman
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Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers - danger, death, and live ammunition.
Barbara W. Tuchman
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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
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The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.
Barbara W. Tuchman
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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
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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
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Satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
Barbara W. Tuchman
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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
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Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female.
Barbara W. Tuchman
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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
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Chroniclers habitually matched numbers to the awesomeness of the event.
Barbara W. Tuchman
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When commerce with Moslems flourished, zeal for their massacre declined.
Barbara W. Tuchman
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Government remains the paramount area of folly because it is there that men seek power over others—only to lose it over themselves.
Barbara W. Tuchman
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Better be killed than frightened to death.
Robert Smith Surtees
Barbara W. Tuchman
Wikipedia
Born:
January 30, 1912
Died:
February 6, 1989
(aged 77)
Bio:
Barbara Wertheim Tuchman was an American historian and author.
Known for:
The Guns of August (1962)
A Distant Mirror (1978)
The Proud Tower (1966)
The March of Folly (1984)
Most used words:
war
,
time
,
power
,
history
,
government
,
century
,
books
,
14th
,
dead
,
fact
,
policy
,
historian
,
mind
,
people
,
face
Barbara W. Tuchman on Wikipedia
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