Civilization Quotes by Barbara Tuchman

While husbands and lovers in the stories are of all kinds, ranging from sympathetic to disgusting, women are invariably deceivers: inconstant, unscrupulous, quarrelsome, querulous,…

— Barbara Tuchman

Doctrine tied itself into infinite knots over the realities of sex.

— Barbara Tuchman

The fleet sailed to its war base in the North Sea, headed not so much for some rendezvous with glory as for rendezvous with…

— Barbara Tuchman

Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced

— Barbara Tuchman

War is the unfolding of miscalculations.

— Barbara Tuchman

The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.

— Barbara Tuchman

Money was the crux. Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical…

— Barbara Tuchman

Misgovernment is of four kinds, often in combination. They are: 1) tyranny or oppression, of which history provides so many well-known examples that they…

— Barbara Tuchman

The power to command frequently causes failure to think.

— Barbara Tuchman

We seem to be afflicted by a widespread and eroding reluctance to take any stand on any values, moral, behavioral or esthetic.

— Barbara Tuchman

The clergy [in the 14th century] on the whole were probably no more lecherous or greedy or untrustworthy than other men, but because they…

— Barbara Tuchman

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

— Barbara Tuchman