276 Quotes by Barbara W. Tuchman

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

I command, or I keep quiet.” Napoleon.

His decision suggests that an absence of overriding personal ambition together with shrewd common sense are among the essential components of wisdom.

These private wars were fought by the knights with furious gusto and a single strategy, which consisted in trying to ruin the enemy by killing or maiming as many of his peasants and destroying as many crops, vineyards, tools, barns, and other possessions as possible, thereby reducing his sources of revenue. As a result, the chief victim of the belligerents was their respective peasantry.

The castle’s predecessor, the Roman villa, had been unfortified, depending on Roman law and the Roman legions for its ramparts.

Although the mortality rate was erratic, ranging from one fifth in some places to nine tenths or almost total elimination in others, the overall estimate of modern demographers has settled – for the area extending from India to Iceland – around the same figure expressed in Froissart’s casual words: “a third of the world died.

Can the military art be learned in the games and hunts in which you pass your youth?” The.

In the same five years three new colleges were founded at Cambridge – Trinity, Corpus Christi, and Clare – although love of learning, like love in marriage, was not always the motive. Corpus Christi was founded in 1352 because fees for celebrating masses for the dead were so inflated after the plague that two guilds of Cambridge decided to establish a college whose scholars, as clerics, would be required to pray for their deceased members.

One aristocratic leader’s club was known for, “an atmosphere of solemn tranquility, in which reading, dozing, and meditation took precedence over conversation.