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To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.
Barbara Tuchman
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Barbara Tuchman
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More quotes by Barbara Tuchman
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
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
The writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention.
Barbara Tuchman
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
Money was the crux. Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself.
Barbara Tuchman
In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.
Barbara Tuchman
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
Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
Barbara Tuchman
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
When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.
Barbara Tuchman
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.
Barbara Tuchman
Completeness is rare in history.
Barbara Tuchman
Governments do not like to face radical remedies it is easier to let politics predominate.
Barbara Tuchman
If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.
Barbara Tuchman
Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
Barbara Tuchman
The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.
Barbara Tuchman
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
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
Russians, in the knowledge of inexhaustible supplies of manpower, are accustomed to accepting gigantic fatalities with comparative calm.
Barbara Tuchman
Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced
Barbara Tuchman