Quotes from Barbara W. Tuchman

Contradictory conditions are always present. Evidence

Folly is a child of power.

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.

The scene is France. The theater is the world.

ecclesiam nulla salus

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

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.

Even his own speeches bored him.

When death slowed production, goods became scarce and prices soared. In France the price of wheat increased fourfold by 1350. At the same time the shortage of labor brought the plague's greatest social disruption—a concerted demand for higher wages. Peasants as well as artisans, craftsmen, clerks, and priests discovered the lever of their own scarcity.

Each one of us is serious individually, but together we become frivolous.

Owing to the disabilities of the two major sovereigns, one incapacitated by alcohol and the other by insanity, the result was not what it might have been. Renewed madness was already darkening Charles's mind when he arrived and in the brief intervals when he was lucid, Wenceslas was drunk.

Inventive rhetoric is characteristic of true believers.

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

Plagues had been known before, from the plague of Athens (believed to have been typhus)

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.

Satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.

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.

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

if autocrats always acted wisely they would not furnish history with moral lessons.

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.

Talent for oratory can simulate the need for action and even thought.

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

is more unfair," as an English historian has well said, "than to judge men of the past by the ideas of the present. Whatever may be said of morality, political wisdom is certainly ambulatory.

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.