Barbara W. 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.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman

“Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. They are engines of change, windows on the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman

“War is the unfolding of miscalculations.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman

“Books are humanity in print.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman

“Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced”
― Barbara W. Tuchman

“Human beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

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

“When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“Books are ... companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of mind. Books are humanity in print.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman

“The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history's clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August: The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Classic About the Outbreak of World War I

“For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“Honor wears different coats to different eyes.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman

“Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“[T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“Of the two classes of Prussian officer, the bull-necked and the wasp-waisted, he belonged to the second. Monocled and effete in appearance, cold and distant in manner, he concentrated with such single-mindedness on his profession that when an aide, at the end of an all-night staff ride in East Prussia, pointed out to him the beauty of the river Pregel sparkling in the rising sun, the General gave a brief, hard look and replied, 'An unimportant obstacle.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman

“Had all the world been a school and Wilson its principal, he would have been the greatest statesman in history.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Zimmermann Telegram

“If there have been mute inglorious Miltons in rural villages, presumably there have been unrealized Washingtons born in unpropitious times.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“When it comes to leaders we have, if anything, a superabundance—hundreds of Pied Pipers…ready and anxious to lead the population. They are scurrying around, collecting consensus, gathering as wide an acceptance as possible. But what they are not doing, very notably, is standing still and saying, ' This is what I believe. This I will do and that I will not do. This is my code of behavior and that is outside it. This is excellent and that is trash.' There is an abdication of moral leadership in the sense of a general unwillingness to state standards….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. We are too unsure of ourselves to assert them, to stick by them, if necessary in the case of persons who occupy positions of authority, to impose them. We seem to be afflicted by a widespread and eroding reluctance to take any stand on any values, moral, behavioral or esthetic.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman

“The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August: The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Classic About the Outbreak of World War I

“Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers - danger, death, and live ammunition.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August: The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Classic About the Outbreak of World War I

“No less a bold and pugnacious figure than Winston Churchill broke down and was unable to finish his remarks at the sendoff of the British Expeditionary Force into the maelstrom of World War I in Europe.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August: The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Classic About the Outbreak of World War I

“Books are humanity in print”
― Barbara W. Tuchman

“Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as "the most flagrant of all passions.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam