Top 160 Barbara W. Tuchman Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “One by one, members of the Commons, speaking in turn at a lectern in the center of the chamber, added their charges and complaints. The King’s councillors, they said, had grown rich at the cost of impoverishing the nation; they had deceived the King and wasted his revenues, causing the repeated demands for fresh subsidies. The people were too poor and feeble to endure further taxation. Let Parliament discuss instead how the King might maintain the war out of his own resources.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

52. “These private wars were fought by the knights with furious gusto and a single strategy, which consisted in trying to ruin the enemy by killing or maiming as many of his peasants and destroying as many crops, vineyards, tools, barns, and other possessions as possible, thereby reducing his sources of revenue. As a result, the chief victim of the belligerents was their respective peasantry.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

53. “Wherever the Reformation took hold the Bible replaced the Pope as the final spiritual authority.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

54. “Once people envisioned the possibility of change in a fixed order, the end of an age of submission came in sight; the turn to individual conscience lay ahead. To that extent the Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

55. “Government was rarely more than a choice between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

56. “Believing themselves superior in soul, in strength, in energy, industry, and national virtue, Germans felt they deserved the dominion of Europe.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

57. “For each man that shall be damned shall be damned by his own guilt, and each man that is saved shall be saved by his own merit.” Unperceived, here was the start of the modern world. When.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

58. “Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as “the most flagrant of all passions.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

59. “Mankind’s tragedy is that he can draw up blueprints for a better life but he cannot live up to them.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

60. “He never hears the truth about himself by not wishing to hear it.” Pope Alexander.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

61. “Inevitably, as hatred of monarchy was added to hatred of episcopacy, they were led to republicanism.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

62. “Medieval technology could raise marvels of architecture 200 feet in the air, it could conceive the mechanics of a loom capable of weaving patterned cloth, and of a gearshaft capable of harnessing the insubstantial air to turn a heavy millstone, but it failed to conceive the fore-and-aft rig and swinging boom capable of adapting sails to the direction of the wind. By such accident of the human mind, war, trade, and history are shaped.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

63. “The turn of events in Belgium was a product of the German theory of terror. Clausewitz had prescribed terror as the proper method to shorten war, his whole theory of war being based on the necessity of making it short, sharp, and decisive. The civil population must not be exempted from war’s effects but must be made to feel its pressure and be forced by the severest measures to compel their leaders to make peace.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

64. “In many guilds artisans struck for higher pay and shorter hours. In an age when social conditions were regarded as fixed, such action was revolutionary.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

65. “The cry of “Traitor!” was not a local voice only, but a bewildered people’s explanation of the inexplicable. It was the eternal cry of conspiracy, of stab in the back.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

66. “This was the Evangelical Revival that now began to take hold on the propertied class, who, frightened by what was happening in France, were anxiously mending their fences, spiritual as well as political. To escape rationalism’s horrid daughter, revolution, they were only too willing to be enfolded in the anti-intellectual embrace of Evangelicalism, even if it demanded faith and good works and a willing suspension of disbelief.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

67. “The overpowering unimportance of this MAKES ME SPEECHLESS. – Speaker of the House of Representatives Thomas Reed.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

68. “The British minister, making his own inquiries, was told that if British troops landed before a German invasion or without a formal Belgian request, the Belgians would open fire. Belgium’s rigid purity confirmed what the British never tired of repeating to the French – that everything depended upon the Germans violating Belgian neutrality first.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

69. “Because life was collective, it was intensely sociable and dependent on etiquette, hence the emphasis on courteous conduct and clean fingernails.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

70. “Despised as ineffective, they were ineffective because they were despised.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

71. “The French right wing, opening the offensive into German-occupied Lorraine, took an old embattled path like so many in France and Belgium where, century after century, whatever the power that makes men fight brought legions tramping down the same roads, leveling the same villages.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

72. “Though surnamed the Wise, he was not immune from the occupational disease of rulers: overestimation of their capacity to control events. No.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

73. “The only really detestable character in Chaucer’s company of Canterbury pilgrims is the Pardoner with his stringy locks, his eunuch’s hairless skin, his glaring eyes like a hare’s, and his brazen acknowledgment of the tricks and deceits of his trade.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

74. “Armed forces were no longer primarily feudal levies serving under a vassal’s obligation who went home after forty days; they were recruited bodies who served for pay.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

75. “Every incident in the Old Testament was considered to pre-figure in allegory what was to come in the New.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

76. “It was one of the peculiar malfunctions of technology that shore batteries on the islands were generally of inadequate caliber and range to knock out a ship approaching with hostile intent. One is moved to wonder why, if a 10-pounder gun could be mounted on the rolling deck of a sailing vessel, the same or larger could not be mounted on land?”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

77. “Nations, like people, are often more pragmatic than they know or can explain.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

78. “At Coucy’s level, men and women hawked and hunted and carried a favorite falcon, hooded, on the wrist wherever they went, indoors or out – to church, to the assizes, to meals. On occasion, huge pastries were served from which live birds were released to be caught by hawks unleashed in the banquet.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

79. “Isolation might be more hazardous than splendor.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

80. “Even the respectable have a small anarchist hidden on the inside.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

81. “Fine dressing could not be suppressed despite ever-renewed sumptuary laws which tried especially and repeatedly to outlaw the pointed shoes.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

82. “An event of great agony is bearable only in the belief that it will bring about a better world. When it does not, as in the aftermath of another vast calamity in 1914–18, disillusion is deep and moves on to self-doubt and self-disgust. In creating a climate for pessimism, the Black Death was the equivalent of the First World War, although it took fifty years for the psychological effects to develop.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

83. “The limitation prompting folly ” was an attitude of superiority so dense as to be impenetrable.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

84. “A great imperative imparts a wonderful impulse to the spirit.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

85. “It is a feature of government that the more important the problem, the further it tends to be removed from handling by anyone well acquainted with the subject.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

86. “A regular method was the levy for a crusade, which allowed ecclesiastical income within each country to be taxed by its king, who soon came to regard it as a right.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

87. “He was always acting, always enveloping himself in artificiality, perhaps to conceal the volcano within.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

88. “Extravagant sartorial display had a purpose. It created the impression of wealth and power on the opponent and pride in the wearer which has been lost sight of in our nervously egalitarian times.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

89. “There was an aura about 1914 that caused those who sensed it to shiver for mankind. Tears came even to the most bold and resolute.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

90. “Only the Church offered an organizing principle, which was the reason for its success, for society cannot bear anarchy.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

91. “Christine makes it her own in the prologue, where she sits weeping and ashamed, wondering why men “are so unanimous in attributing wickedness to women” and why “we should be worse than men since we were also created by God.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

92. “The wave of insurrection passed, leaving little change in the condition of the working class. Inertia in the scales of history weighs more heavily than change. Four hundred years were to elapse before the descendants of the Maillotins seized the Bastille.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

93. “No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard and fast and specific decision.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

94. “The scene is France. The theater is the world.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

95. “Everything interested him and everything excited him.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

96. “William McKinley was a man made to be managed.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

97. “In proportion that property is small, the danger of misusing the franchisee is great.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

98. “Civilians who volunteer generally wish to escape, not to share, privatizations worse than their own.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

99. “The follies that produced the loss of American virtue following Vietnam begin with continuous overreacting, in the invention of endangered national security, the invention of vital interest, the invention of a commitment which rapidly assumed a life of its own .”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

100. “When Latimer demanded to know by whom and by what authority he was being indicted, Sir Peter de la Mare supplied the historic answer that the Commons as a body would maintain all their charges in common. At one stroke he created the constitutional means for impeachment and removal of ministers.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman