Barbara W. Tuchman - Fact Quotes

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After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening, on a lucky day, without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena.

Barbara W. Tuchman
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 W. Tuchman
What counts is not so much the fact as what the public perceives to be the fact.

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
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
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
Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place.

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

Barbara W. Tuchman