Above all, discard the irrelevant. Barbara Tuchman More Quotes by Barbara Tuchman More Quotes From Barbara Tuchman Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline. Barbara Tuchman demand discipline order To be a bestseller is not necessarily a measure of quality, but it is a measure of communication. Barbara Tuchman quality communication book Wisdom - meaning judgment acting on experience, common sense, available knowledge, and a decent appreciation of probability. Barbara Tuchman common-sense wisdom appreciation 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. Barbara Tuchman home two school If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity. Barbara Tuchman degrees taken writing Voluntary self-directed religion was more dangerous to the Church than any number of infidels. Barbara Tuchman church self numbers Completeness is rare in history. Barbara Tuchman completeness history Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general. Barbara Tuchman military comfort mind 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 common-sense government lying Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip. Barbara Tuchman battle military mind The story and study of the past, both recent and distant, will not reveal the future, but it flashes beacon lights along the way and it is a useful nostrum against despair. Barbara Tuchman despair light past The fleet sailed to its war base in the North Sea, headed not so much for some rendezvous with glory as for rendezvous with discretion. Barbara Tuchman sea war history If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements,corrupts even more. Barbara Tuchman weakness compromise power Whatever solace the Christian faith could give was balanced by the anxiety it generated. Barbara Tuchman anxiety christian giving 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 poison running war Woman was the Church's rival, the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the Devil's decoy. Barbara Tuchman women devil church No nation in the world has so many drastic problems squeezed into so small a space, under such urgent pressure of time and heavy burden of history, as Israel. Barbara Tuchman space israel world It hurt the economic historians, the Marxists and the fabians, to admit that the Ten Hour Bill, the basic piece of 19th century legislation, came down from the top, out of aa nobleman's private feelings about the Gospel, or that the abolition of the slave trade was achieved, not through the operation of some "law" of profit and loss, but peurlet as the result of tyhe new humanitarianism of the Evangelicals. Barbara Tuchman hurt law loss [T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death. Barbara Tuchman century pain emotion For me, the card catalog has been a companion all my working life. To leave it is like leaving the house one was brought up in. Barbara Tuchman leaving house cards
