Top 160 Barbara W. Tuchman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Marsilius of Padua, whose Defensor Pacis in 1324 was a forthright assertion of the supremacy of the state.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

2. “The attitude was a sense of superiority so dense as to be impenetrable. A feeling of this kind leads to ignorance of the world and of others because it suppresses curiosity.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

3. “Awful momentum makes carrying through easier than calling off folly.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

4. “Folly is a child of power.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

5. “Contradictory conditions are always present. Evidence.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

6. “Penalties were established for refusal to work, for leaving a place of employment to seek higher pay, and for the offer of higher pay by employers. Proclaimed when Parliament was not sitting, the ordinance was reissued in 1351 as the Statute of Laborers.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

7. “The Battle of the Marne was one of the decisive battles of the world not because it determined that Germany would ultimately lose or the Allies ultimately win the war but because it determined that the war would go on. There was no looking back, Joffre told the soldiers on the eve. Afterward there was no turning back. The nations were caught in a trap, a trap made during the first thirty days out of battles that failed to be decisive, a trap from which there was, and has been, no exit.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

8. “The impetus of existing plans is always stronger than the impulse to change.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

9. “Persian poet said, the rose blooms reddest where some buried Caesar bled. The.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

10. “Satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

11. “Women were considered the snare of the Devil, while at the same time the cult of the Virgin made one woman the central object of love and adoration.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

12. “Perhaps by this time the 14th century was not quite sane. If enlightened self-interest is the criterion of sanity, in the verdict of Michelet, “no epoch was more naturally mad.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

13. “The road to India, the Suez Canal, the oil fields of Mosul, the whole complex of political and strategic requirements that drew Britain into Palestine in 1918, began with the enterprise of the Elizabethan merchant adventurers.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

14. “Everything one has a right to do is not best to be done.” Benjamin Franklin.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

15. “If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us!” lamented Samuel Coleridge. “But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern which shines only on the waves behind us.” The image is beautiful but.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

16. “Books are carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. They are engines of change, windows of the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

17. “Smite a villein and he will bless you; bless a villein and he will smite you.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

18. “Medieval justice was scrupulous about holding proper trials and careful not to sentence without proof of guilt, but it achieved proof by confession rather than evidence, and confession was routinely obtained by torture.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

19. “The poorest man in his cottage may bid defiance to all the force of the Crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storms may enter; the rain may enter – but the King of England cannot enter; all his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

20. “No one is so sure of his premises as the man who knows too little.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

21. “To admit error and cut losses is rare among individuals, unknown among states. States function only in terms of what those in control perceive as power or personal ambition, and both of these wear blinkers.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

22. “Books are... companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of mind. Books are humanity in print.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

23. “One aristocratic leader’s club was known for, “an atmosphere of solemn tranquility, in which reading, dozing, and meditation took precedence over conversation.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

24. “Everything one has a right to do is not best to be done.” This in essence was to be the Burke thesis: that principle does not have to be demonstrated when the demonstration is inexpedient.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

25. “I command, or I keep quiet.” Napoleon.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

26. “Although the defects of the Russian Army were notorious, although the Russian winter, not the Russian Army, had turned Napoleon back from Moscow, although it had been defeated on its own soil by the French and British in the Crimea, although the Turks in 1877 had outfought it at the siege of Plevna and only succumbed later to overwhelming numbers, although the Japanese had outfought it in Manchuria, a myth of its invincibility prevailed.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

27. “Margery Kempe was obviously an uncomfortable neighbor to have, like all those who cannot conceal the painfulness of life.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

28. “Confronted by menace or what is perceived as menace, governments will usually attempt to smash it, rarely to examine it, understand it, and drefine it.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

29. “Enormity of the stakes became the new self-hypnosis.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

30. “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

31. “A terrible worm in an iron cocoon,” as he was called in an anonymous poem, the knight rode on a saddle rising in a high ridge above the horse’s backbone with his feet resting in very long stirrups so that he was virtually standing up and able to deliver tremendous swinging blows from side to side with any one of his armory of weapons.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

32. “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

33. “For, as Professor Turner has pointed out, “history originated as myth” and becomes a “social memory” to which men can appeal, “knowing it will provide justification for their present actions or convictions.” If.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

34. “The problem with research, of course, was knowing when to stop. “One must stop before one has finished,” she advised, “otherwise, one will never stop and never finish.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

35. “When beggars die there are no comets seen; The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

36. “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

37. “Party animosity was concealed under a veil of studied courtesy.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

38. “Advice to young Samuel Gompers that might apply in many other areas: “Learn from socialism, but don’t join it.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

39. “The English patrician bloomed in his natural climate.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

40. “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

41. “It might be the destiny of the Jewish race,” he said, “to be the bridge between Asia and Europe, to bring the spirituality of Asia to Europe and the vitality of Europe to Asia.” At.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

42. “They resented the patronage they depended upon.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

43. “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

44. “Command, deprived of personal judgment, can win no battles.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

45. “Between policy-makers in the capital and realities in the field lies an eternal gap whitened by the bones of failed and futile efforts.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

46. “If the historian will submit himself to his material instead of trying to impose himself on his material, then the material will ultimately speak to him and supply the answers.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

47. “Now according to German logic, a declaration of war was found to be unnecessary because of imaginary bombings.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

48. “Money was evil, beauty vain, and both were transitory. Ambition was pride, desire for gain was avarice, desire of the flesh was lust, desire for honor, even for knowledge and beauty, was vainglory. Insofar as these diverted man from seeking the life of the spirit, they were sinful.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

49. “He wanted AFFIRMATION rather than INFORMATION.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

50. “Henry Adams, like most people, saw society in his own image.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman