Historians who stuff in every item of research they have found, every shoelace and telephone call of a biographical subject, are not doing the hard work of selecting and shaping a readable story.
BARBARA TUCHMANI want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning to the end.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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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 to act upon what they suspected to be true.
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The open frontier, the hardships of homesteading from scratch, the wealth of natural resources.
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Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
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satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
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The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.
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The writer’s object is – or should be – to hold the reader’s attention.
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[T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death.
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To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
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Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
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Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
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The Church [in the 14th century] gave ceremony and dignity to lives that had little of either. It was the source of beauty and art to which all had some access and which many helped to create.
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Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.
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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.
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Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.
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Voluntary self-directed religion was more dangerous to the Church than any number of infidels.
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If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.
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Human beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot.
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The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard
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Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.
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Whatever solace the Christian faith could give was balanced by the anxiety it generated.
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Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
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Words are seductive and dangerous material, to be used with caution.
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Books are humanity in print.
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Doctrine tied itself into infinite knots over the realities of sex.
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The reality of a question is inevitably more complicated than we would like to suppose.
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A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.
BARBARA TUCHMAN