Barbara Tuchman Quotes

62 quotes in 986 categories

• Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.
• To put away one's own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.
• Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip.
• An essential element for good writing is a good ear: One must listen to the sound of one's own prose.
• I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning to the end.
• Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence.
• No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.
• When every autumn people said it could not last through the winter, and when every spring there was still no end in sight, only the…
• Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
• Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence. It is no fun to write lumpishly, dully, in prose the reader must plod through…
• 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.
• Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
• 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…
• The open frontier, the hardships of homesteading from scratch, the wealth of natural resources, the whole vast challenge of a continent waiting to be exploited,…
• The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard
• The Germans could not get over the perfidy of it. It was unbelievable that the English, having degenerated to the stage where suffragettes heckled the…
• Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex.
• 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…
• One constant among the elements of 1914—as of any era—was the disposition of everyone on all sides not to prepare for the harder alternative, not…
• Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female.

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