Barbara Tuchman famous quotes

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Teacher #Book #Sea

Books are humanity in print.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Book #Humanity #Print

War is the unfolding of miscalculations.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Peace #Military #War

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Stupid #Book #Reading

An essential element for good writing is a good ear: One must listen to the sound of one's own prose.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Writing #Sound #Essentials

Books are the carriers of civilization... .....Books are humanity in print.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Book #Civilization #Humanity

Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence. It is no fun to write lumpishly, dully, in prose the reader must plod through like wet sand. But it is a pleasure to achieve, if one can, a clear running prose that is simple yet full of surprises. This does not just happen. It requires skill, hard work, a good ear, and continued practice.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Running #Fun #Hard Work

Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Doors #Library #Closed Doors

To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Book #Two #Cooking

Modern historians have suggested that in his last years he (Richard II) was overtaken by mental disease, but that is only a modern view of the malfunction common to 14th century rulers: inability to inhibit impulse.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Views #Years #Inability

When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Reason #Heard #Presumption

The ills and disorders of the 14th century could not be without consequence. Times were to grow worse over the next fifty-odd years until at some imperceptible moment, by the some mysterious chemistry, energies were refreshed, ideas broke out of the mold of the Middle Ages into new realms, and humanity found itself redirected.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Years #Ideas #Humanity

It is wiser, I believe, to arrive at theory by way of evidence rather than the other way around.... It is more rewarding, in any case, to assemble the facts first and, in the process of arranging them in narrative form, to discover a theory or a historical generalization emerging of its own accord.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Believe #Historical #Atheism

The Hundred Years' War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#War #Years #Unity

bureaucracy, safely repeating today what it did yesterday, rolls on as ineluctably as some vast computer, which, once penetrated by error, duplicates it forever.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Errors #Yesterday #Forever

To be a bestseller is not necessarily a measure of quality, but it is a measure of communication.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Book #Communication #Quality

In the search for meaning we must not forget that the gods (or God, for that matter) are a concept of the human mind; they are the creatures of man, not vice versa. They are needed and invented to give meaning and purpose to the struggle that is life on Earth, to explain strange and irregular phenomena of nature, haphazard events and, above all, irrational human conduct. They exist to bear the burden of all things that cannot be comprehended except by supernatural intervention or design.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Struggle #Men #Giving

Governments do not like to face radical remedies; it is easier to let politics predominate.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Government #Faces #Easier

If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Common #Authority #Should

In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Peace #History #Historical

Doctrine tied itself into infinite knots over the realities of sex.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Sex #Reality #Doctrine

For most people reform meant relief from ecclesiastical extortions.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#People #Reform #Relief

To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Library #Shelter #Muse

Diplomacy means all the wicked devices of the Old World, spheres of influence, balances of power, secret treaties, triple alliances, and, during the interim period, appeasement of Fascism.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Mean #Power #Secret

To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Firsts #Garments #Legitimacy

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

#Running #War #Poison

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

#Lying #Government #Common Sense

In the midst of events there is no perspective.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Perspective #Events #Midst

Whatever solace the Christian faith could give was balanced by the anxiety it generated.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Christian #Giving #Anxiety

Voluntary self-directed religion was more dangerous to the Church than any number of infidels.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Self #Numbers #Church

The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Communism #Communist #Myth

The better part of valor is to spend it learning to live with differences, however hostile, unless and until we can find another planet.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Differences #Conflict #Planets

I ask myself, have nations ever declined from a loss of moral sense rather than from physical reasons or the pressure of barbarians? I think that they have.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Loss #Thinking #Barbarians

Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government, and when combined with a position of power even more so.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Strong #Power #Thinking

The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Power #Action #Appetite

Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Art #Ideas #Christianity

satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Reality #Satire #Exaggeration

The conduct of war was so much more interesting than its prevention.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#War #Interesting #Prevention

Wisdom - meaning judgment acting on experience, common sense, available knowledge, and a decent appreciation of probability.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Wisdom #Appreciation #Common Sense

Words are seductive and dangerous material, to be used with caution.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Seductive #Used #Dangerous

I have always been in a condition in which I cannot not write.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Writing

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

#Pain #Emotion #Century

In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Law #United States #Contempt

The fact of being reported increases the apparent extent of a deplorable development by a factor of ten.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Tragedy #Development #Facts

In America, where the electoral process is drowning in commercial techniques of fund-raising and image-making, we may have completed a circle back to a selection process as unconcerned with qualifications as that which made Darius King of Persia. ... he whose horse was the first to neigh at sunrise should be King.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Horse #Kings #Government

Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Thinking #Government #Self

Government remains the paramount area of folly because it is there that men seek power over others - only to lose it over themselves.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Power #Men #Folly

A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Government #Pursuit #Periods

Policy is formed by preconceptions, by long implanted biases. When information is relayed to policy-makers, they respond in terms of what is already inside their heads and consequently make policy less to fit the facts than to fit the notions and intentions formed out of the mental baggage that has accumulated in their minds since childhood.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Government #Long #Childhood

Completeness is rare in history ...
-- Barbara Tuchman

#History #Completeness

The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians ...
-- Barbara Tuchman

#People #History #Poetry

To rush in upon an event before its significance has had time to separate from the surrounding circumstances may be enterprising, but is it useful? ... The recent prevalence of these hot histories on publishers' lists raises the question: Should - or perhaps can - history be written while it is still smoking?
-- Barbara Tuchman

#History #Smoking #Events

Human behavior is timeless.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Behavior #Timeless #Human Behavior

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

#Israel #Space #World

in the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight
-- Barbara Tuchman

#War #Hindsight #Midst