Barbara W. Tuchman Quotes

103 Sourced Quotes

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

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 They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.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
Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.

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

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

Barbara W. Tuchman
What his imagination is to the poet, facts are to the historian. His exercise of judgment comes in their selection, his art in their arrangement. His method is narrative.... His subject is the story of man's past. His function is to make it known.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Barbara W. Tuchman
There is no such thing as a neutral or purely objective historian. Without an opinion a historian would be simply a ticking clock, and unreadable besides.

Barbara W. Tuchman
One constant among the elements of 1914—as of any era—was the disposition of everyone on all sides not to prepare for the harder alternative, not to act upon what they suspected to be true.

Barbara W. Tuchman
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 W. Tuchman
Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.

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

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

Barbara W. Tuchman
Perhaps by this time the 14th century was not quite sane. If enlightened self-interest is the criterion of sanity, in the verdict of Michelet, no epoch was more naturally mad.

Barbara W. Tuchman
It is wiser, I believe, to arrive at theory by way of evidence rather than the other way round... 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 on its own accord.

Barbara W. Tuchman
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 W. Tuchman