Barbara Tuchman Quotes (24 Quotes)

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

Books are humanity in print.

The fleet sailed to its war base in the North Sea, headed not so much for some rendezvous with glory as for rendezvous with discretion.

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

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.

To put away one's own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.

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

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

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

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

War is the unfolding of miscalculations.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

For me, the card catalog has been a companion all my working life. To leave it is like leaving the house one was brought up in.

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

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.

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.

Honor wears different coats to different eyes.

Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip.

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.