Top 160 Barbara W. Tuchman Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “The daughter is the goddess, separately or together, of Infatuation, Mischief, Delusion and Blind Folly, rendering her victims “incapable of rational choice” and blind to distinctions of morality and expedience.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

102. “In writing I am seduced by the sound of words and by the interaction of their sound and sense.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

103. “The Empire had no political cohesion, no capital city, no common laws, common finances, or common officials. It was the relic of a dead ideal.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

104. “The utility of perseverance in absurdity is more than I could ever discern. Edmund Burke.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

105. “Inventive rhetoric is characteristic of true believers.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

106. “The fate of warnings in political affairs is to be futile when the recipient wishes otherwise.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

107. “There is no record what Asquith replied or what, in his inmost mind, a region difficult to penetrate under the best of circumstances, he thought on this crucial question.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

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

— Barbara W. Tuchman

109. “The process of gaining power employs means which degrade or brutalize the seeker, who awakes to find that power has been possessed at the cost of virtue or moral purpose lost.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

110. “Preconceived, fixed notions can be more damaging than cannon.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

111. “Any person who considers himself, and intends to remain, a member of Western society inherits the Western past from Athens and Jerusalem to Runnymede and Valley Forge, as well as to Watts and Chicago of August 1968. He may ignore it or deny it, but that does not alter the fact. The past sits back and smiles and knows it owns him anyway.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

112. “Puritanism, he said, was a reaction to the loss of moral fiber that accompanied the Renaissance.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

113. “I will only mention that the independent power of words to affect the writing of history is a thing to be watched out for. They have an almost frightening autonomous power to produce in the mind of the reader an image or idea that was not in the mind of the writer. Obviously they operate this way in all forms of writing, but history is particularly sensitive because one has a duty to be accurate, and careless use of words can leave a false impression one had not intended.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

114. “Fear of God is thrown away,” lamented Brigitta in Rome, “and in its place is a bottomless bag of money.” All the Ten Commandments, she said, had been reduced to one: “Bring hither the money.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

115. “To “establish despotism over such a mighty nation must be vain, must be fatal. We shall be forced ultimately to retreat: let us retreat when we can, not when we must.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

116. “If it was bliss to be alive, to hunt was rapture.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

117. “Irritability was an occupational disease. Intolerant and intolerable belong in the same category.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

118. “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

119. “Of England’s patrician class, the author writes: “It was easy to be agreeable when everything was done to keep them in comfort and ease.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

120. “Know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

121. “The clergy were to pray for all men, the knight to fight for them, and the commoner to work that all might eat.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

122. “According to then current laws of war, the besieged could make terms if they surrendered, but not if they forced a siege to its bitter end, so presumably Charles felt no compunctions.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

123. “He was the most persuasive speaker, less for his words than character behind them. He made every listener feel he had done his best to master every aspect of this question, who has been driven by logic to arrive at certain conclusions, and who is disguising from us no argument on either side.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

124. “Although 1870 proved the corollary of the theory and practice of terror, that it deepens antagonism, stimulates resistance, and ends by lengthening war, the Germans remained wedded to it.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

125. “They were twelve days in which world history wavered between two courses and the Germans came so close to victory that they reached out and touched it between the Aisne and the Marne.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

126. “Although the mortality rate was erratic, ranging from one fifth in some places to nine tenths or almost total elimination in others, the overall estimate of modern demographers has settled – for the area extending from India to Iceland – around the same figure expressed in Froissart’s casual words: “a third of the world died.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

127. “In addition to grand estate, Coucy clearly possessed a personal power of attraction and a faculty for not making enemies.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

128. “Political balance among the competing groups was unstable because the king had no permanent armed force at his command.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

129. “Even his own speeches bored him.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

130. “Had all the world been a school and Wilson its principal, he would have been the greatest statesman in history.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

131. “Clausewitz, a dead Prussian, and Norman Angell, a living if misunderstood professor, had combined to fasten the short-war concept upon the European mind. Quick, decisive victory was the German orthodoxy;.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

132. “Guides were Franciscan monks, sole custodians of the holy places after 1230, who recited the history and traditions associated with each town or monument or site of Biblical events to parties of visitors as they arrived. More.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

133. “He accomplished wonders of diplomacy on the principle, never give way, and never give offense.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

134. “Between the happening of a historical process and its recognition by rulers, a lag stretches, full of pitfalls.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

135. “In the woe of the century no factor caused more trouble than the persistent lag between the growth of the state and the means of state financing. While centralized government was developing, taxation was still encased in the concept that taxes represented an emergency measure requiring consent.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

136. “In theory the Holy Roman Emperor exercised a temporal sway matching the spiritual rule of the Pope over the universal community under God.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

137. “That the Jews were unholy was a belief so ingrained by the Church that the most devout persons were the harshest in their antipathy, none more so than St. Louis. If the Jews were unholy, then killing and looting them was holy work.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

138. “Prison does not silence ideas whose time has come.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

139. “Those deterrents – the brotherhood of socialists, the interlocking of finance, commerce, and other economic factors – which had been expected to make war impossible failed to function when the time came. Nationhood, like a wild gust of wind, arose and swept them aside. People.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

140. “Have we,” he wondered, “conceived a merely human project and then imagined it to be a decree of the Almighty?”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

141. “In the same five years three new colleges were founded at Cambridge – Trinity, Corpus Christi, and Clare – although love of learning, like love in marriage, was not always the motive. Corpus Christi was founded in 1352 because fees for celebrating masses for the dead were so inflated after the plague that two guilds of Cambridge decided to establish a college whose scholars, as clerics, would be required to pray for their deceased members.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

142. “No single characteristic ever overtakes an entire society.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

143. “Revolutions produce other men, not new men. Halfway between truth and endless error, the mold of the species is permanent. That is Earth’s burden.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

144. “Asked what would be his idea of Heaven, one statesman in 1897 said it would be to “receive a flow of telegrams alternating news of a British victory by sea and a British victory by land.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

145. “Malignant phenomena do not come out of a golden age.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

146. “But with that burst of the fairness that he can never repress, he admits that conversion is unlikely as long as Christians exclude Jews from the community: “There must be first conversing with them before there can be converting them.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

147. “Eyeglasses had been in use since the turn of the century, allowing old people to read more in their later years and greatly extending the scholar’s life of study. The manufacture of paper as a cheaper and more plentiful material than parchment was beginning to make possible multiple copies and wider distribution of literary works.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

148. “His only weakness was the habit of prophesying war within the next fortnight. George Bernard Shaw.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

149. “Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

150. “If they are afraid of revision in the laboratory, truth will never be released except by accident.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman