Barbara Tuchman Quotes

Things break all the time. Glass and dishes and fingernails. Cars and contracts and potato chips. You can break a record, a horse, a dollar. You can break the ice. There are coffee breaks and lunch breaks and prison breaks. Day breaks, waves break, voices break. Chains can be broken. So can silence, and fever... promises break. Hearts break.

Things seem to fall apart inevitably.

When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.

Everything is still falling apart.

I have always been interested in the concept of ruin.

Pride is the first step in people unraveling and companies unraveling and relationships unraveling.

Nothing in Chicago seems to be working the way it’s supposed to.

This system isn't working.

Sometimes the wheels just fall off a relationship.

Changes occur because there’s a gap between what is and what should be.

There is always a gap between intention and action.

It is the little rift within the lute That by and by will make the music mute, And ever widening slowly silence all.

Mind the gap - it's the distance between life as you dream it and life as it is.

Going to pieces. To go to pieces so pointlessly and unnecessarily.

And as things fell apart, nobody paid much attention

The coach has turned into a pumpkin and the mice have all run away.

If you disaggregate, things fall apart.

I would like to explode, flow, crumble into dust, and my disintegration would be my masterpiece.

The pieces all fit together. Yet everything was falling apart.

When the forces that hold it together go away, the body must fall.

We are no longer in a state of growth; we are in a state of excess. We are living in a society of excrescence. The boil is growing out of control, recklessly at cross purposes with itself, its impacts multiplying as the causes disintegrate.

Me seemes the world is runne quite out of square,From the first point of his appointed sourse,And being once amisse growes daily wourse and wourse.

Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.

If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than later.

The discrepancy between what was expected and what has been observed has grown over the years, and we're straining harder and harder to fill the gap.