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A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century QUOTES

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century QUOTES

1 " 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 , A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

2 " Between the happening of a historical process and its recognition by rulers, a lag stretches, full of pitfalls. "

― Barbara W. Tuchman , A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

3 " An event of great agony is bearable only in the belief that it will bring about a better world. When it does not, as in the aftermath of another vast calamity in 1914-18, disillusion is deep and moves on to self-doubt and self-disgust. "

― Barbara W. Tuchman , A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

4 " In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record. "

― Barbara W. Tuchman , A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

5 " Human beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot. "

― Barbara W. Tuchman , A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

6 " When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down. "

― Barbara W. Tuchman , A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

7 " 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 W. Tuchman , A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

8 " the seven “liberal arts”: Grammar, the foundation of science; Logic, which differentiates the true from the false; Rhetoric, the source of law; Arithmetic, the foundation of order because “without numbers there is nothing”; Geometry, the science of measurement; Astronomy, the most noble of the sciences because it is connected with Divinity and Theology; and lastly Music. "

― Barbara W. Tuchman , A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

9 " Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. 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. This has led me to formulate Tuchman's Law, as follows: "The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold" (or any figure the reader would care to supply). "

― Barbara W. Tuchman , A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

10 " History was finite and contained within comprehensible limits. It began with the Creation and was scheduled to end in a not indefinitely remote future with the Second Coming, which was the hope of afflicted mankind, followed by the Day of Judgment. Within that span, man was not subject to social or moral progress because his goal was the next world, not betterment in this. In this world he was assigned to ceaseless struggle against himself in which he might attain individual progress and even victory, but collective betterment would only come in the final union with God. "

― Barbara W. Tuchman , A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

11 " [T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death. "

― Barbara W. Tuchman , A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

12 " The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold. "

― Barbara W. Tuchman , A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

13 " The textile industry was the automobile industry of the Middle Ages, "

― Barbara W. Tuchman , A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

14 " If there have been mute inglorious Miltons in rural villages, presumably there have been unrealized Washingtons born in unpropitious times. "

― Barbara W. Tuchman , A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

15 " The origin of war, according to its 14th century codifier Honoré Bonet, lay in Lucifer’s war against God, "

― Barbara W. Tuchman , A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

16 " Fear of God is thrown away,” lamented Brigitta in Rome, “and in its place is a bottomless bag of money.” All the Ten Commandments, she said, had been reduced to one: “Bring hither the money. "

― Barbara W. Tuchman , A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

17 " To admit error and cut losses is rare among individuals, unknown among states. States function only in terms of what those in control perceive as power or personal ambition, and both of these wear blinkers. "

― Barbara W. Tuchman , A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

18 " 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. "

― Barbara W. Tuchman , A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

19 " 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 W. Tuchman , A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

20 " In France they were called écorcheurs (skinners) and routiers (highwaymen), in Italy condottieri from the condotta or contract that fixed the terms of their employment as mercenaries. "

― Barbara W. Tuchman , A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century