Barbara Tuchman Quotes

"No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision."
- Barbara Tuchman
(Related: Government, 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."
- Barbara Tuchman
(Related: Life)

"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."
- Barbara Tuchman
(Related: War, Discretion, Glory, Sea)

"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."
- Barbara Tuchman
(Related: Power, Diplomacy, Fascism, Influence, Old, World)

"Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general."
- Barbara Tuchman
(Related: Maxim, Military, Mind, Nothing)

"Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline."
- Barbara Tuchman
(Related: Discipline, Habit)

"The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard."
- Barbara Tuchman
(Related: Friend, Being, Old, Past)

"Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill."
- Barbara Tuchman
(Related: History, Science, Thought, Civilization, Books, Dumb, Literature)

"Books are humanity in print."
- Barbara Tuchman
(Related: Books, Humanity)

"War is the unfolding of miscalculations."
- Barbara Tuchman
(Related: War)

"Honor wears different coats to different eyes."
- Barbara Tuchman
(Related: Eyes, Honor)

"To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse."
- Barbara Tuchman
(Related: Food, Libraries)

"Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip."
- Barbara Tuchman
(Related: Military, Mind)

"To put away one's own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost."
- Barbara Tuchman
(Related: Thoughts, Order, Sin)

"Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed."
- Barbara Tuchman
(Related: Time, Successful, Revolution)