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
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 They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.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
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

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

Barbara W. Tuchman
Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as the most flagrant of all the passions.

Barbara W. Tuchman
Nothing is more certain than death and nothing uncertain but its hour.

Barbara W. Tuchman
Confronted by menace, or what is perceived as menace, governments will usually attempt to smash it, rarely to examine it, understand it, define it.

Barbara W. Tuchman
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 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
The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history's clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.

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

Barbara W. Tuchman
I have always felt like an artist when I work on a book. I see no reason why the word should always be confined to writers of fiction and poetry.

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
Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers - danger, death, and live ammunition.

Barbara W. Tuchman
As the era of the sword was ending, that of firearms began, in time to allow no lapse in man's belligerent capacity.

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

Barbara W. Tuchman
Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex. As long as combat was desirable as the source of honor and glory, the knight had no wish to share it with the commoner, even for the sake of success.

Barbara W. Tuchman
Money was the crux. Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself.

Barbara W. Tuchman
Satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.

Barbara W. Tuchman
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 W. Tuchman
Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female.

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
Chroniclers habitually matched numbers to the awesomeness of the event.

Barbara W. Tuchman
When commerce with Moslems flourished, zeal for their massacre declined.

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

Barbara W. Tuchman