Barbara W. Tuchman Quotes
Most popular Barbara W. Tuchman Quotes
War is the unfolding of miscalculations.
History is the unfolding of miscalculation.
Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
Satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
What his imagination is to the poet, facts are to the historian.
The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.
Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.
Wisdom—meaning judgment acting on experience, common sense, available knowledge, and a decent appreciation of probability.
Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as "the most flagrant of all the passions."
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 the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
There is no such thing as a neutral or purely objective historian. Without an opinion a historian would be simply a ticking clock, and unreadable besides.
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.
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.
