Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Of all the ills that our poor ... society is heir to, the focal one, it seems to me, from which so much of our uneasiness and confusion derive, is the absence of standards.
Barbara Tuchman
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Barbara Tuchman
Much
Heirs
Derive
Confusion
Absence
Standards
Focal
Poor
Uneasiness
Society
Heir
Seems
Ills
More quotes by Barbara Tuchman
No nation in the world has so many drastic problems squeezed into so small a space, under such urgent pressure of time and heavy burden of history, as Israel.
Barbara Tuchman
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
Barbara Tuchman
Friendship of a kind that cannot easily be reversed tomorrow must have its roots in common interests and shared beliefs.
Barbara Tuchman
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
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
Completeness is rare in history.
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
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
Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
Barbara Tuchman
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
Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced
Barbara Tuchman
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
If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.
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
Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
Barbara Tuchman
To be right and overruled is not forgiven to persons in responsible positions.
Barbara Tuchman
More than a code of manners in war and love, Chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life.
Barbara Tuchman
The Hundred Years' War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity.
Barbara Tuchman
If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.
Barbara Tuchman
The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.
Barbara Tuchman