A Quote by Barbara Tuchman
In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.
Quote Topics
Quote Author
Related Quotes
Great leaders understand that historical success tends to produce stable and inwardly focused organizations, and these outfits, in turn, reinforce a feeling of contentment with the status quo.
Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals and nations live by and tell themselves, and you change the individuals and nations.
I don't think one can accurately measure the historical effectiveness of a poem; but one does know, of course, that books influence individuals; and individuals, although they are part of large economic and social processes, influence history. Every mass is after all made up of millions of individuals.
Technology is rooted in the past. It dominates the present and tends into the future. It is a real historical movement - one of the great movements which shape and represent their epoch.
The military mind tends to be conservative, realistic and historical. The civilian mind tends to be liberal, idealistic and Utopian. Journalists, obviously, are civilians, and they tend to distrust, and to suspect, the military's motives.
The history of nations, in the sense in which I use the word, is often best studied in works not professedly historical.
The founders of the United Nations expected that member nations would behave and vote as individuals after they had weighed the merits of an issue - rather like a great, global town meeting. The emergence of blocks and the polarization of the United Nations undermine all that this organization initially valued.
If the resources of different nations are treated as exclusive properties of these nations as wholes, if international economic relations, instead of being relations between individuals, become increasingly relations between whole nations organized as trading bodies, they inevitably become the source of friction and envy between whole nations.
Humanistic values of equality and equal rights for all nations and individuals as crystallized in the principles of the United Nations Charter are mankind's great achievements in the 20th century.
If you're playing the a historical character that's in the public consciousness, then obviously you've got to make an effort to look like that person and there's a huge amount of historical record there that you have to kind of comply to.
If you're playing a historical character that's in the public consciousness, then obviously you've got to make an effort to look like that person and there's a huge amount of historical record there that you have to kind of comply to.
It is with antiquity as with ancestry, nations are proud of the one, and individuals of the other; but if they are nothing in themselves, that which is their pride ought to be their humiliation.
Historical tends to be my bailiwick.
Contentment is not by addition but by subtraction: seeking to add a thing will not bring contentment. Instead, subtracting from your desires until you are satisfied only with Christ brings contentment.
Contentment is the door to god. If one is contented, one has already arrived. And the meaning of contentment is absolute acceptance as you are. Contentment means acceptance, discontentment means non-acceptance. A wants to become B - that is discontent. A is perfectly happy in being A, there is no desire to become B - that is contentment.
Nations! What are nations? Tartars! and Huns! and Chinamen! Like insects they swarm. The historian strives in vain to make them memorable. It is for want of a man that there are so many men. It is individuals that populate the world.
Related Authors
Alexis de Tocqueville Quotes
French
Historian
Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes
American
Historian
David McCullough Quotes
American
Historian
Edward Gibbon Quotes
English
Historian
Hannah Arendt Quotes
German
Historian
Henry Adams Quotes
American
Historian
Herodotus Quotes
Greek
Historian
Howard Zinn Quotes
American
Historian
Linda Colley Quotes
British
Historian
Livy Quotes
Roman
Historian
Michel Foucault Quotes
French
Historian
Robert Dallek Quotes
American
Historian
Tacitus Quotes
Roman
Historian
Tariq Ali Quotes
Pakistani
Historian
Thucydides Quotes
Greek
Historian
Will Durant Quotes
American
Historian