Barbara Tuchman Quotes

War is the unfolding of miscalculations.

The nastiness of women [in the 14th century] was generally perceived at the close of life when a man began to worry about hell, and his sexual desire in any case fading.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

The power to command frequently causes failure to think.

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

Woman was the Church's rival, the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the Devil's decoy.

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

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

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

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

To gain victory over the flesh was the purpose of fasting and celibacy, which denied the pleasures of this world for the sake of reward in the next.

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.

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

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

For most people reform meant relief from ecclesiastical extortions.

I have always been in a condition in which I cannot not write.

Honor wears different coats to different eyes.

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

Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence.

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

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

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

Above all, discard the irrelevant.

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.

I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning to the end.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Human behavior is timeless.

Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced

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

In the midst of events there is no perspective.