Barbara Tuchman
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.Collection: Teacher
Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government, and when combined with a position of power even more so.Collection: Strong
Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts.Collection: Thinking
Policy is formed by preconceptions, by long implanted biases. When information is relayed to policy-makers, they respond in terms of what is already inside their heads and consequently make policy less to fit the facts than to fit the notions and intentions formed out of the mental baggage that has accumulated in their minds since childhood.Collection: Government
In America, where the electoral process is drowning in commercial techniques of fund-raising and image-making, we may have completed a circle back to a selection process as unconcerned with qualifications as that which made Darius King of Persia. ... he whose horse was the first to neigh at sunrise should be King.Collection: Horse
In the search for meaning we must not forget that the gods (or God, for that matter) are a concept of the human mind; they are the creatures of man, not vice versa. They are needed and invented to give meaning and purpose to the struggle that is life on Earth, to explain strange and irregular phenomena of nature, haphazard events and, above all, irrational human conduct. They exist to bear the burden of all things that cannot be comprehended except by supernatural intervention or design.Collection: Struggle
What his imagination is to the poet, facts are to the historian. His exercise of judgment comes in their selection, his art in their arrangement.Collection: Art
Government remains the paramount area of folly because it is there that men seek power over others - only to lose it over themselves.Collection: Power
One must stop conducting research before one has finished. Otherwise, one will never stop and never finish.Collection: Research
If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements,corrupts even more.Collection: Power
The power to command frequently causes failure to think.Collection: Thinking
To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.Collection: Firsts
The better part of valor is to spend it learning to live with differences, however hostile, unless and until we can find another planet.Collection: Differences
Words are seductive and dangerous material, to be used with caution.Collection: Seductive
Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female.Collection: Males
Woman was the Church's rival, the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the Devil's decoy.Collection: Women
An essential element for good writing is a good ear: One must listen to the sound of one's own prose.Collection: Writing
When people don't have an objective, there's much less dynamic effort, and that makes life a lot less interesting.Collection: People
No economic activity was more irrepressible [in the 14th century] than the investment and lending at interest of money; it was the basis for the rise of the Western capitalist economy and the building of private fortunes-and it was based on the sin of usury.Collection: Capitalist Economy
In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.Collection: Peace
Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.Collection: War
The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.Collection: People
Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.Collection: Speech
Doctrine tied itself into infinite knots over the realities of sex.Collection: Sex
[T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death.Collection: Pain
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.Collection: Book
satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.Collection: Reality
I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning to the end.Collection: Writing
Historians who stuff in every item of research they have found, every shoelace and telephone call of a biographical subject, are not doing the hard work of selecting and shaping a readable story.Collection: Hard Work
I have always been in a condition in which I cannot not write.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Israel
The fact of being reported increases the apparent extent of a deplorable development by a factor of ten.Collection: Tragedy
In a country where misery and want were the foundation of the social structure, famine was periodic, death from starvation common, disease pervasive, thievery normal, and graft and corruption taken for granted, the elimination of these conditions in Communist China is so striking that negative aspects of the new rule fade in relative importance.Collection: Death
Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.Collection: Art
For most people reform meant relief from ecclesiastical extortions.Collection: People
To ensure that no one gained an advantage over anyone else, commercial law prohibited innovation in tools or techniques, underselling below a fixed price, working late by artificial light, employing extra apprentices or wife and under-age children, and advertising of wares or praising them to the detriment of others.Collection: Children
More than a code of manners in war and love, Chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life.Collection: War
For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use.Collection: Technology
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.Collection: Art
The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.Collection: Communism
Whatever solace the Christian faith could give was balanced by the anxiety it generated.Collection: Christian
The ills and disorders of the 14th century could not be without consequence. Times were to grow worse over the next fifty-odd years until at some imperceptible moment, by the some mysterious chemistry, energies were refreshed, ideas broke out of the mold of the Middle Ages into new realms, and humanity found itself redirected.Collection: Years
Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers - danger, death, and live ammunition.Collection: Missing
If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.Collection: Common
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.Collection: Smart
It hurt the economic historians, the Marxists and the fabians, to admit that the Ten Hour Bill, the basic piece of 19th century legislation, came down from the top, out of aa nobleman's private feelings about the Gospel, or that the abolition of the slave trade was achieved, not through the operation of some "law" of profit and loss, but peurlet as the result of tyhe new humanitarianism of the Evangelicals.Collection: Hurt
Modern historians have suggested that in his last years he (Richard II) was overtaken by mental disease, but that is only a modern view of the malfunction common to 14th century rulers: inability to inhibit impulse.Collection: Views
Belgium, where there occurred one of the rare appearances of the hero in history, was lifted above herself by the uncomplicated conscience of her King and, faced with the choice to acquiesce or resist, took less than three hours to make her decision, knowing it might be mortal.Collection: Kings
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.Collection: Running
Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practicedCollection: Teaching