Quotes from Barbara W. Tuchman

Isolation might be more hazardous than splendor.

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

Philip was fascinated by the all-absorbing question of the Beatific Vision: whether the souls of the blessed see the face of God immediately upon entering Heaven or whether they have to wait until the Day of Judgment.

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.

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

Nevertheless, Schlieffen decided, in the event of war, to attack France by way of Belgium.

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

Everything interested him and everything excited him.

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

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

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.

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.

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

The boy would learn to ride, to fight, and to hawk, the three chief physical elements of noble life,

Doctors were admired, lawyers universally hated and mistrusted.

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.

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

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.

Balfour did, in fact, hold certain basic convictions, but he could see arguments on both sides of a matter, which is the penalty of the thoughtful man.

All human temperaments were considered to belong to one or another of the four humors—sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, and melancholic.

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

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

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.

To plunge into passionate dispute over the trivialities of so-called honor is a queerer but not uncommon gambit of men who have just come from putting their lives at stake in serious combat,