Barbara Tuchman Quotes

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

Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.

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.

Governments do not like to face radical remedies; it is easier to let politics predominate.

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

If all were equalized by death, as the medieval idea constantly emphasized, was it not possible that inequalities on earth were contrary to the will of God?

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

Human beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot.

We seem to be afflicted by a widespread and eroding reluctance to take any stand on any values, moral, behavioral or esthetic.

Rome had Caesar, a man of remarkable governing talents, although it must be said that a ruler who arouses opponents to resort to assassination is probably not as smart as he ought to be.

The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.

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.

That conflict between the reach for the divine and the lure of earthly things was to be the central problem of the Middle Ages.

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

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

Confronted by menace, or what is perceived as menace, governments will usually attempt to smash it, rarely to examine it, understand it, define it.

To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.

If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements,corrupts even more.

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.

Voluntary self-directed religion was more dangerous to the Church than any number of infidels.

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

The Hundred Years' War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity.

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

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

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

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

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

The story and study of the past, both recent and distant, will not reveal the future, but it flashes beacon lights along the way and it is a useful nostrum against despair.

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.

Russians, in the knowledge of inexhaustible supplies of manpower, are accustomed to accepting gigantic fatalities with comparative calm.

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

No female iniquity was more severely condemned than the habit of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten the forehead.

I ask myself, have nations ever declined from a loss of moral sense rather than from physical reasons or the pressure of barbarians? I think that they have.

Completeness is rare in history.

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.

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

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

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.

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 reality of a question is inevitably more complicated than we would like to suppose.

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.

Nothing can stop an enemy from picking wireless messages out of the free air - and nothing did.