Barbara Tuchman Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

Books are humanity in print.

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

The power to command frequently causes failure to think.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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, windows on the world, and (as a poet has said) "lighthouses erected in the sea of time." They are companions , teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.