The voices / 104 fragments

Barbara W. Tuchman

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Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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01Undated

A reformer exhorted children that they would succeed where he and his colleagues had failed with the charge: "Live for that better day.

Barbara W. Tuchman / quote

02Undated

Everything interested him and everything excited him.

Barbara W. Tuchman / quote

03Undated

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

Barbara W. Tuchman / quote

04Undated

Books are humanity in print.

Barbara W. Tuchman / quote

05Undated

Books are ... companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of mind. Books are humanity in print.

Barbara W. Tuchman / quote

06Undated

Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex.

Barbara W. Tuchman / quote

07Undated

House Speaker Thomas Reed could destroy an argument or expose a fallacy in fewer words than anyone else. His language was vivid and picturesque. He had a way of phrasing things which was peculiarly apt and peculiarly his own.

Barbara W. Tuchman / quote

08Undated

Now according to German logic, a declaration of war was found to be unnecessary because of imaginary bombings

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09Undated

Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as "the most flagrant of all passions.

Barbara W. Tuchman / quote

10Undated

Any person who considers himself, and intends to remain, a member of Western society inherits the Western past from Athens and Jerusalem to Runnymede and Valley Forge, as well as to Watts and Chicago of August 1968. He may ignore it or deny it, but that does not alter the fact. The past sits back and smiles and knows it owns him anyway.

Barbara W. Tuchman / quote

11Undated

Nineteenth-century liberalism had assumed that man was a rational being who operated naturally according to his own best interests, so that in the end, what was reasonable would prevail. On this principle liberals defended extension of the suffrage toward the goal of one man, one vote. But a rise in literacy and in the right to vote, as the event proved, did nothing to increase common sense in politics. The mob that is moved by waving the bloody shirt, that decides elections in response to slogans—Free Silver, Hang the Kaiser, Two Cars in Every Garage—is not exhibiting any greater political sense than Marie Antoinette, who said, “Let them eat cake,” or Caligula, who made his horse a consul. The common man proved no wiser than the decadent aristocrat. He has not shown in public affairs the innate wisdom which democracy presumed he possessed.

Barbara W. Tuchman / quote

12Undated

The writer of history, I believe, has a number of duties vis-à-vis the reader, if he wants to keep him reading. The first is to distill. He must do the preliminary work for the reader, assemble the information, make sense of it, select the essential, discard the irrelevant- above all, discard the irrelevant - and put the rest together so that it forms a developing dramatic narrative. Narrative, it has been said , is the lifeblood of history. To offer a mass of undigested facts, of names not identified and places not located, is of no use to the reader and is simple laziness on the part of the author, or pedantry to show how much he has read.

Barbara W. Tuchman / quote

13Undated

Government was rarely more than a choice between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

Barbara W. Tuchman / quote

14Undated

The process of gaining power employs means which degrade or brutalize the seeker, who awakes to find that power has been possessed at the cost of virtue or moral purpose lost.

Barbara W. Tuchman / quote

15Undated

No less a bold and pugnacious figure than Winston Churchill broke down and was unable to finish his remarks at the sendoff of the British Expeditionary Force into the maelstrom of World War I in Europe.

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16Undated

William McKinley was a man made to be managed.

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17Undated

House speaker Thomas read could see the trend, but he could not have changed himself.

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18Undated

What other country has had the privilege of making the world's heart beat faster?

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19Undated

Diplomacy's primary law: LEAVE ROOM FOR NEGOTIATION.

Barbara W. Tuchman / quote

20Undated

The art of oratory was considered part of the equipment of a statesman.

Barbara W. Tuchman / quote

21Undated

The author says one patrician English leader saw his relationship with the populace thusly: He wasn't responsible TO them. He was responsible FOR them. He was responsible for their care.

Barbara W. Tuchman / quote

22Undated

A minister's (cabinet member's) function was not to DO the work but to see that it got done.

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23Undated

Duty was not untinged by ambition.

Barbara W. Tuchman / quote

24Undated

Britain had an air of careless supremacy which GALLED her neighbors.

Barbara W. Tuchman / quote