What his imagination is to the poet, facts are to the historian. His exercise of judgment comes in their selection, his art in their arrangement.
BARBARA TUCHMANThe whole vast challenge of a continent waiting to be exploited, combined to produce a prevailing materialism and an American drive bent as much, if not more, on money, property, and power than was true of the Old World from which we had fled.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
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Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.
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Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
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Human behavior is timeless.
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The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.
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Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
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Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
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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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If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements,corrupts even more.
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More than a code of manners in war and love, Chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life.
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Russians, in the knowledge of inexhaustible supplies of manpower, are accustomed to accepting gigantic fatalities with comparative calm.
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Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.
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The writer’s object is – or should be – to hold the reader’s attention.
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Voluntary self-directed religion was more dangerous to the Church than any number of infidels.
BARBARA TUCHMAN






