Barbara W. Tuchman quotes

Books are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.

Barbara W. Tuchman

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

Barbara W. Tuchman

No writing comes alive unless the writer sees across his desk a reader, and searches constantly for the word or phrase which will carry the image he wants the reader to see, and arouse the emotion he wants him to feel. Without consciousness of a live reader, what a man writes will die on his page.

Barbara W. Tuchman

Honor wears different coats to different eyes.

Barbara W. Tuchman

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

Barbara W. Tuchman

The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard.

Barbara W. Tuchman

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. They are engines of change, windows on the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time.

Barbara W. Tuchman

Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip and Germans, no less than other peoples, prepare for the last war.

Barbara W. Tuchman

A relentless talent for tactlessness.

Barbara W. Tuchman

Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced.

Barbara W. Tuchman

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

Barbara W. Tuchman

Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.

Barbara W. Tuchman

War is the unfolding of miscalculations.

Barbara W. Tuchman

Rome had Caesar, a man of remarkable governing talents, although it must be said that a ruler who arouses opponents to resort to assassination is probably not as smart as he ought to be.

Barbara W. Tuchman

Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.

Barbara W. Tuchman

History is the unfolding of miscalculation.

Barbara W. Tuchman

No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.

Barbara W. Tuchman

The open frontier, the hardships of homesteading from scratch, the wealth of natural resources, the whole vast challenge of a continent waiting to be exploited, combined to produce a prevailing materialism and an American drive bent as much, if not more, on money, property, and power than was true of the Old World from which we had fled.

Barbara W. Tuchman

In a country where misery and want were the foundation of the social structure, famine was periodic, death from starvation common, disease pervasive, thievery normal, and graft and corruption taken for granted, the elimination of these conditions in Communist China is so striking that negative aspects of the new rule fade in relative importance.

Barbara W. Tuchman

If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements, corrupts even more.

Barbara W. Tuchman

Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey. It is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.

Barbara W. Tuchman

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 W. Tuchman

In April 1917 the illusion of isolation was destroyed,
America came to the end of innocence, and of the exuberant freedom of bachelor independence. That the responsibilities of world power have not made us happier is no surprise. To help ourselves manage them, we have replaced the illusion of isolation with a new illusion of omnipotence.

Barbara W. Tuchman

When every autumn people said it could not last through the winter, and when every spring there was still no end in sight, only the hope that out of it all some good would accrue to mankind kept men and nations fighting. When at last it was over, the war had many diverse results and one dominant one transcending all others: disillusion.

Barbara W. Tuchman