Barbara W. Tuchman Quotes

When reproached for spending too much time with books and clerks, Charles answered, “As long as knowledge is honored in this country, so long will it prosper.”

on the Bengal Famine Inquiry Commission 1943 in Stevenson, Richard. Bengal Tiger and British Lion: An Account of the Bengal Famine of 1943. United States: iUniverse, 2005.

What is government but an arrangement by which the many accept the authority of the few?

In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.

For most people reform meant relief from ecclesiastical extortions.

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.

History is the unfolding of miscalculations.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.

Economic man and sensual man are not suppressible.

Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening—on a lucky day—without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. This has led me to formulate Tuchman's Law, as follows: "The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold" (or any figure the reader would care to supply).

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.

Against men habituated to lawless force, violent punishment failed to bring the violence under control.

Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. UK: Oxford University Press, 1975. p.175

Nothing is more certain than death and nothing uncertain but its hour.

The system was aided by the Church, whose natural interests allied it more to the great than to the meek.