Barbara W. Tuchman Quotes

A reformer exhorted children that they would succeed where he and his colleagues had failed with the charge: Live for that better day.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Everything interested him and everything excited him.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

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. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Books are humanity in print.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Books are ... companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of mind. Books are humanity in print.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

House Speaker Thomas Reed could destroy an argument or expose a fallacy in fewer words than anyone else. His language was vivid and picturesque. He had a way of phrasing things which was peculiarly apt and peculiarly his own.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Now according to German logic, a declaration of war was found to be unnecessary because of imaginary bombings

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as the most flagrant of all passions.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Any person who considers himself, and intends to remain, a member of Western society inherits the Western past from Athens and Jerusalem to Runnymede and Valley Forge, as well as to Watts and Chicago of August 1968. He may ignore it or deny it, but that does not alter the fact. The past sits back and smiles and knows it owns him anyway.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Nineteenth-century liberalism had assumed that man was a rational being who operated naturally according to his own best interests, so that in the end, what was reasonable would prevail. On this principle liberals defended extension of the suffrage toward the goal of one man, one vote. But a rise in literacy and in the right to vote, as the event proved, did nothing to increase common sense in politics. The mob that is moved by waving the bloody shirt, that decides elections in response to slogans—Free Silver, Hang the Kaiser, Two Cars in Every Garage—is not exhibiting any greater political sense than Marie Antoinette, who said, “Let them eat cake,” or Caligula, who made his horse a consul. The common man proved no wiser than the decadent aristocrat. He has not shown in public affairs the innate wisdom which democracy presumed he possessed.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

The writer of history, I believe, has a number of duties vis-à-vis the reader, if he wants to keep him reading. The first is to distill. He must do the preliminary work for the reader, assemble the information, make sense of it, select the essential, discard the irrelevant- above all, discard the irrelevant - and put the rest together so that it forms a developing dramatic narrative. Narrative, it has been said , is the lifeblood of history. To offer a mass of undigested facts, of names not identified and places not located, is of no use to the reader and is simple laziness on the part of the author, or pedantry to show how much he has read.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Government was rarely more than a choice between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

The process of gaining power employs means which degrade or brutalize the seeker, who awakes to find that power has been possessed at the cost of virtue or moral purpose lost.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

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 Expeditionary Force into the maelstrom of World War I in Europe.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

William McKinley was a man made to be managed.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

House speaker Thomas read could see the trend, but he could not have changed himself.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

What other country has had the privilege of making the world's heart beat faster?

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Diplomacy's primary law: LEAVE ROOM FOR NEGOTIATION.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

The art of oratory was considered part of the equipment of a statesman.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

The author says one patrician English leader saw his relationship with the populace thusly: He wasn't responsible TO them. He was responsible FOR them. He was responsible for their care.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

A minister's (cabinet member's) function was not to DO the work but to see that it got done.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Duty was not untinged by ambition.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Britain had an air of careless supremacy which GALLED her neighbors.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Confronted by menace or what is perceived as menace, governments will usually attempt to smash it, rarely to examine it, understand it, and drefine it.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

The utility of perseverance in absurdity is more than I could ever discern. Edmund Burke

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

He was always acting, always enveloping himself in artificiality, perhaps to conceal the volcano within.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Connection was the cement of the governing class.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Between the happening of a historical process and its recognition by rulers, a lag stretches, full of pitfalls.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

I will only mention that the independent power of words to affect the writing of history is a thing to be watched out for. They have an almost frightening autonomous power to produce in the mind of the reader an image or idea that was not in the mind of the writer. Obviously they operate this way in all forms of writing, but history is particularly sensitive because one has a duty to be accurate, and careless use of words can leave a false impression one had not intended.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

In writing I am seduced by the sound of words and by the interaction of their sound and sense.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

If the historian will submit himself to his material instead of trying to impose himself on his material, then the material will ultimately speak to him and supply the answers.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

They resented the patronage they depended upon.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Even his own speeches bored him.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests. Mankind, it seems, makes a poorer performance of government than of almost any other human activity. In this sphere, wisdom, which may be defined as the exercise of judgment acting on experience, common sense and available information, is less operative and more frustrated than it should be. Why do holders of high office so often act contrary to the way reason points and enlightened self-interest suggests? Why does intelligent mental process seem so often not to function?

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

An event of great agony is bearable only in the belief that it will bring about a better world. When it does not, as in the aftermath of another vast calamity in 1914-18, disillusion is deep and moves on to self-doubt and self-disgust.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

He had been present in their minds not as a man but as an idea.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Isolation might be more hazardous than splendor.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

If it was bliss to be alive, to hunt was rapture.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

How much does a man's effort depend upon the age in which his work is cast? Pope Clement VII

~ Barbara W. Tuchman