All Barbara Tuchman Quotes
- Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline. Bureaucratic
- To put away one's own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost. Book
- Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip. Battle
- An essential element for good writing is a good ear: One must listen to the sound of one's own prose. Ear
- I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning to the end. End
- Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence. Good
- No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision. British
- 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… Accrue
- Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library. Closed
- 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… Achieve
- 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. Base
- Honor wears different coats to different eyes. Coats
- 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… Archive
- 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,… American
- The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard Fell
- 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… Defied
- Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex. Christianity
- 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… Bold
- 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… Act
- Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female. Female
- Belgium, where there occurred one of the rare appearances of the hero in history, was lifted above herself by the uncomplicated conscience of her King… Acquiesce
- Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy. Argument
- 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… Bankers
- 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 do… Ambition
- If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity. Any