Barbara Tuchman Quotes

Nothing overshadows truth so completely as authority.

Truth is always the enemy of power. And power the enemy of truth.

The main threat to freedom comes from church ministers who depend upon fear and superstitions to gain and to keep power

Power is not sufficient evidence of truth.

They who gain applause and power by pandering to the mistakes, the prejudices and passions of the multitude are the enemies of liberty.

Power is domination, control, and therefore a very selective form of truth which is a lie.

What the power structure is afraid of is that we're going to learn to recognize the truth when we hear it.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

Religions are the cradles of despotism.

History’s most important lesson is that it has not been possible to make coercion compatible with the truth.

Patriotism ... for rulers is nothing else than a tool for achieving their power-hungry and money-hungry goals, and for the ruled it means renouncing their human dignity, reason, conscience, and slavish submission to those in power. ... Patriotism is slavery.

The silence of peoples is something kings should study.

Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesize and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.

Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.

When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.

The greatest triumphs of propoganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.

A regime that wraps itself in the flag of truth fears truth most of all, for if its story is falsified to the slightest degree, its authority is gone.

When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.

To succeed in chaining the multitude, you must seem to wear the same fetters.

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.

who are the brain police?

Shall I faint, now that I have poured out the spirit of my mind to the world, and treated many subjects with truth, with freedom, with power, because I have been followed with one cry of abuse ever since for not being a Government tool?

Abuse of power comes as no surprise

The nightmare spirit of control has always been, and is, profoundly stupid.

Oh, the truth, oh yeah, lot of trouble that got us into, didn't it, over the last maybe thousand years? Hitler knew the truth, so did Stalin, so did Mao Zedong, so did the Inquisition. They all knew the truth and that caused such horror. Certainty is the enemy.