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 They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.
BARBARA TUCHMANFor belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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In the midst of events there is no perspective.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
I have always been in a condition in which I cannot not write.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
in the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight
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Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government, and when combined with a position of power even more so.
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Rome had Caesar, a man of remarkable governing talents, although it must be said that a ruler who arouses opponents to resort to assassination is probably not as smart as he ought to be.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
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In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.
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Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.
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In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.
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Doctrine tied itself into infinite knots over the realities of sex.
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Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements,corrupts even more.
BARBARA TUCHMAN