Barbara W. Tuchman Short Quotes

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Economic man and sensual man are not suppressible.

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

Barbara W. Tuchman
Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.

Barbara W. Tuchman
Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.

Barbara W. Tuchman
Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.

Barbara W. Tuchman
For one August in its history Paris was French—and silent.

Barbara W. Tuchman
Satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.

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

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

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

Barbara W. Tuchman
For most people reform meant relief from ecclesiastical extortions.

Barbara W. Tuchman
The conduct of war was so much more interesting than its prevention.

Barbara W. Tuchman
Words are seductive and dangerous material, to be used with caution.

Barbara W. Tuchman
Nothing is more certain than death and nothing uncertain but its hour.

Barbara W. Tuchman
Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.

Barbara W. Tuchman
Chroniclers habitually matched numbers to the awesomeness of the event.

Barbara W. Tuchman
The writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention.

Barbara W. Tuchman
When commerce with Moslems flourished, zeal for their massacre declined.

Barbara W. Tuchman
Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female.

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

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

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

Barbara W. Tuchman
To admit error and cut losses is rare among individuals, unknown among states.

Barbara W. Tuchman
To be right and overruled is not forgiven to persons in responsible positions.

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

Barbara W. Tuchman
What counts is not so much the fact as what the public perceives to be the fact.

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

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

Barbara W. Tuchman
What is government but an arrangement by which the many accept the authority of the few?

Barbara W. Tuchman
In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.

Barbara W. Tuchman