Barbara Tuchman

The conduct of war was so much more interesting than its prevention.

— Barbara Tuchman

Human behavior is timeless.

— Barbara Tuchman

No nation in the world has so many drastic problems squeezed into so small a space, under such urgent pressure of time…

— Barbara Tuchman

Rome had Caesar, a man of remarkable governing talents, although it must be said that a ruler who arouses opponents to resort…

— Barbara Tuchman

No female iniquity was more severely condemned [in the 14th century] than the habit of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten…

— Barbara Tuchman

In a country where misery and want were the foundation of the social structure, famine was periodic, death from starvation common, disease…

— Barbara Tuchman

The social damage was not in the failure but in the undertaking, which was expensive. The cost of war was the poison…

— Barbara Tuchman

The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.

— Barbara Tuchman

Policy is formed by preconceptions, by long implanted biases. When information is relayed to policy-makers, they respond in terms of what is…

— Barbara Tuchman

More than a code of manners in war and love, Chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life...

— Barbara Tuchman

Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.

— Barbara Tuchman

The better part of valor is to spend it learning to live with differences, however hostile, unless and until we can find…

— Barbara Tuchman

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without…

— Barbara Tuchman

Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence.

— Barbara Tuchman

To ensure that no one gained an advantage over anyone else, commercial law [in the 14th century] prohibited innovation in tools or…

— Barbara Tuchman

Of all the ills that our poor ... society is heir to, the focal one, it seems to me, from which so…

— Barbara Tuchman

When commerce with Moslems flourished, zeal for their massacre declined.

— Barbara Tuchman

The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.

— Barbara Tuchman

While husbands and lovers in the stories [of the 14th century] are of all kinds, ranging from sympathetic to disgusting, women are…

— Barbara Tuchman

The open frontier, the hardships of homesteading from scratch, the wealth of natural resources, the whole vast challenge of a continent waiting…

— Barbara Tuchman

If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.

— Barbara Tuchman

To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.

— Barbara Tuchman

Above all, discard the irrelevant.

— Barbara Tuchman

When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.

— Barbara Tuchman

No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and…

— Barbara Tuchman