276 Quotes by Barbara W. Tuchman

Once people envisioned the possibility of change in a fixed order, the end of an age of submission came in sight; the turn to individual conscience lay ahead. To that extent the Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man.

No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard and fast and specific decision.

But with that burst of the fairness that he can never repress, he admits that conversion is unlikely as long as Christians exclude Jews from the community: “There must be first conversing with them before there can be converting them.

Fine dressing could not be suppressed despite ever-renewed sumptuary laws which tried especially and repeatedly to outlaw the pointed shoes.

The French right wing, opening the offensive into German-occupied Lorraine, took an old embattled path like so many in France and Belgium where, century after century, whatever the power that makes men fight brought legions tramping down the same roads, leveling the same villages.

Though surnamed the Wise, he was not immune from the occupational disease of rulers: overestimation of their capacity to control events. No.

The feelings of the men who had raised Urban over their own heads probably cannot be adequately described. Some thought that the delirium of power had made the Pope furiosus et melaneholicus – in short, mad.

Mankind’s tragedy is that he can draw up blueprints for a better life but he cannot live up to them.

When a pope’s election could not be explained rationally, it was attributed to the Holy Ghost.