Barbara Tuchman Quotations

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.

If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.

The writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Books are humanity in print.

In America, where the electoral process is drowning in commercial techniques of fund-raising and image-making, we may have completed a circle back to a selection process as unconcerned with qualifications as that which made Darius King of Persia. ... he whose horse was the first to neigh at sunrise should be King.

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.

War is the unfolding of miscalculations.

An essential element for good writing is a good ear: One must listen to the sound of one's own prose.

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.

Books are the carriers of civilization... .....Books are humanity in print.

Words are seductive and dangerous material, to be used with caution.

Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence. It is no fun to write lumpishly, dully, in prose the reader must plod through like wet sand. But it is a pleasure to achieve, if one can, a clear running prose that is simple yet full of surprises. This does not just happen. It requires skill, hard work, a good ear, and continued practice.

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.

The power to command frequently causes failure to think.

Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.

Above all, discard the irrelevant.

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.

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

One must stop conducting research before one has finished. Otherwise, one will never stop and never finish.

Historians who stuff in every item of research they have found, every shoelace and telephone call of a biographical subject, are not doing the hard work of selecting and shaping a readable story.

That conflict between the reach for the divine and the lure of earthly things was to be the central problem of the Middle Ages.

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

In the search for meaning we must not forget that the gods (or God, for that matter) are a concept of the human mind; they are the creatures of man, not vice versa. They are needed and invented to give meaning and purpose to the struggle that is life on Earth, to explain strange and irregular phenomena of nature, haphazard events and, above all, irrational human conduct. They exist to bear the burden of all things that cannot be comprehended except by supernatural intervention or design.

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.

In the midst of events there is no perspective.

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

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.

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.

Friendship of a kind that cannot easily be reversed tomorrow must have its roots in common interests and shared beliefs.

In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.

Doctrine tied itself into infinite knots over the realities of sex.

For most people reform meant relief from ecclesiastical extortions.

If all were equalized by death, as the medieval idea constantly emphasized, was it not possible that inequalities on earth were contrary to the will of God?

Voluntary self-directed religion was more dangerous to the Church than any number of infidels.

To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.

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

Governments do not like to face radical remedies; it is easier to let politics predominate.

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.

[T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death.

Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.

It hurt the economic historians, the Marxists and the fabians, to admit that the Ten Hour Bill, the basic piece of 19th century legislation, came down from the top, out of aa nobleman's private feelings about the Gospel, or that the abolition of the slave trade was achieved, not through the operation of some "law" of profit and loss, but peurlet as the result of tyhe new humanitarianism of the Evangelicals.

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?

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

Completeness is rare in history ...

A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.

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

The better part of valor is to spend it learning to live with differences, however hostile, unless and until we can find another planet.

The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.

bureaucracy, safely repeating today what it did yesterday, rolls on as ineluctably as some vast computer, which, once penetrated by error, duplicates it forever.

It is wiser, I believe, to arrive at theory by way of evidence rather than the other way around.... 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 of its own accord.

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

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.

When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.

Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.

No female iniquity was more severely condemned [in the 14th century] than the habit of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten the forehead.

Wisdom - meaning judgment acting on experience, common sense, available knowledge, and a decent appreciation of probability.

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

satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.

The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.

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

I ask myself, have nations ever declined from a loss of moral sense rather than from physical reasons or the pressure of barbarians? I think that they have.

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

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

Human behavior is timeless.

in the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight

Russians, in the knowledge of inexhaustible supplies of manpower, are accustomed to accepting gigantic fatalities with comparative calm.

We seem to be afflicted by a widespread and eroding reluctance to take any stand on any values, moral, behavioral or esthetic.

The story and study of the past, both recent and distant, will not reveal the future, but it flashes beacon lights along the way and it is a useful nostrum against despair.

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.

Of all the ills that our poor ... society is heir to, the focal one, it seems to me, from which so much of our uneasiness and confusion derive, is the absence of standards.

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.

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

Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as "the most flagrant of all the passions." Because it can only be satisfied by power over others, government is its favorite field of exercise. Business offers a kind of power, but only to the very successful at the top, and without the dominion and titles and red carpets and motorcycle escorts of public office.

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.

No nation in the world has so many drastic problems squeezed into so small a space, under such urgent pressure of time and heavy burden of history, as Israel.

Woman [in the 14th century] was the Church's rival, the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the Devil's decoy.

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

More than a code of manners in war and love, Chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life...

When people don't have an objective, there's much less dynamic effort, and that makes life a lot less interesting.

The reality of a question is inevitably more complicated than we would like to suppose.

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

The clergy [in the 14th century] on the whole were probably no more lecherous or greedy or untrustworthy than other men, but because they were supposed to be better or nearer to God than other men, their failings attracted more attention.

No economic activity was more irrepressible [in the 14th century] than the investment and lending at interest of money; it was the basis for the rise of the Western capitalist economy and the building of private fortunes-and it was based on the sin of usury.

If wisdom in government eludes us, perhaps courage could substitute-the moral courage to terminate mistakes.

The Church [in the 14th century] gave ceremony and dignity to lives that had little of either. It was the source of beauty and art to which all had some access and which many helped to create.

That the Jews were unholy was a belief so ingrained by the Church [by the 14th century] that the most devout persons were the harshest in their antipathy, none more so than St. Louis.

While husbands and lovers in the stories [of the 14th century] are of all kinds, ranging from sympathetic to disgusting, women are invariably deceivers: inconstant, unscrupulous, quarrelsome, querulous, lecherous, shameless, although not necessarily all of these at once.