Quote

The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard

Barbara Tuchman

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Barbara Tuchman
Forests
None
Friend
Tree
Heard
Unrecorded
History
Primeval
Past
Forest
Without
Fell

More quotes by Barbara Tuchman

Image
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.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
To be right and overruled is not forgiven to persons in responsible positions.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
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.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
The fleet sailed to its war base in the North Sea, headed not so much for some rendezvous with glory as for rendezvous with discretion.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
More than a code of manners in war and love, Chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
No female iniquity was more severely condemned than the habit of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten the forehead.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
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.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
bureaucracy, safely repeating today what it did yesterday, rolls on as ineluctably as some vast computer, which, once penetrated by error, duplicates it forever.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
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.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
To gain victory over the flesh was the purpose of fasting and celibacy, which denied the pleasures of this world for the sake of reward in the next.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
That the Jews were unholy was a belief so ingrained by the Church [by the 14th century] that the most devout persons were the harshest in their antipathy, none more so than St. Louis.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
To put away one's own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
The story and study of the past, both recent and distant, will not reveal the future, but it flashes beacon lights along the way and it is a useful nostrum against despair.
Barbara Tuchman