Quote

Above all, discard the irrelevant.

Barbara Tuchman

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Barbara Tuchman
Irrelevant
Discard

More quotes by Barbara Tuchman

Image
Government remains the paramount area of folly because it is there that men seek power over others - only to lose it over themselves.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced
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
Human behavior is timeless.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
Governments do not like to face radical remedies it is easier to let politics predominate.
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
The Hundred Years' War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
One constant among the elements of 1914—as of any era—was the disposition of everyone on all sides not to prepare for the harder alternative, not to act upon what they suspected to be true.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
In April 1917 the illusion of isolation was destroyed, America came to the end of innocence, and of the exuberant freedom of bachelor independence. That the responsibilities of world power have not made us happier is no surprise. To help ourselves manage them, we have replaced the illusion of isolation with a new illusion of omnipotence.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
Completeness is rare in history.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
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.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
When every autumn people said it could not last through the winter, and when every spring there was still no end in sight, only the hope that out of it all some good would accrue to mankind kept men and nations fighting. When at last it was over, the war had many diverse results and one dominant one transcending all others: disillusion.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
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.
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
Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government, and when combined with a position of power even more so.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
While husbands and lovers in the stories are of all kinds, ranging from sympathetic to disgusting, women are invariably deceivers: inconstant, unscrupulous, quarrelsome, querulous, lecherous, shameless, although not necessarily all of these at once.
Barbara Tuchman