Barbara Tuchman quotes

Barbara Tuchman was an acclaimed American historian and author, renowned for her lucid narrative style and focus on popular history. Her works, such as "The Guns of August," brought historical events to a broad audience and earned her two Pulitzer Prizes. She remains celebrated for making complex historical subjects accessible and engaging to readers worldwide. Here are 80 of her quotes:

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

Voluntary self-directed religion was more dangerous to the Church than any number of infidels.

Barbara Tuchman

Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.

Barbara Tuchman

History is the unfolding of miscalculations.

Barbara Tuchman

The Hundred Years' War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity.

Barbara Tuchman

His (Deschamps') complaint of court life was the same as is made of government at the top in any age: it was composed of hypocrisy, flattery, lying, paying and betraying; it was where calumny and cupidity reigned, common sense lacked, truth dared not appear, and where to survive one had to be deaf, blind, and dumb.

Barbara Tuchman

To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.

Barbara Tuchman

In the midst of events there is no perspective.

Barbara Tuchman

If all were equalized by death, as the medieval idea constantly emphasized, was it not possible that inequalities on earth were contrary to the will of God?

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

Whatever solace the Christian faith could give was balanced by the anxiety it generated.

Barbara Tuchman

When commerce with Moslems flourished, zeal for their massacre declined.

Barbara Tuchman

The social damage was not in the failure but in the undertaking, which was expensive. The cost of war was the poison running through the 14th century.

Barbara Tuchman

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

Barbara Tuchman

When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.

Barbara Tuchman

Governments do not like to face radical remedies; it is easier to let politics predominate.

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

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

Barbara Tuchman

That conflict between the reach for the divine and the lure of earthly things was to be the central problem of the Middle Ages.

Barbara Tuchman

If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.

Barbara Tuchman

The emphasis on sorcery reflected accusations by the authorities more than it did actual practice. Being threatened, the Church responded by virulent persecution.

Barbara Tuchman

For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use.

Barbara Tuchman