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 They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.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 TUCHMANThe writer’s object is – or should be – to hold the reader’s attention.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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I have always been in a condition in which I cannot not write.
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Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
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Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced
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Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip.
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Completeness is rare in history.
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Money was the crux. Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
For me, the card catalog has been a companion all my working life. To leave it is like leaving the house one was brought up in.
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Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female.
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Books are the carriers of civilization… Books are humanity in print.
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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.
BARBARA 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.
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The nastiness of women [in the 14th century] was generally perceived at the close of life when a man began to worry about hell, and his sexual desire in any case fading.
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An essential element for good writing is a good ear: One must listen to the sound of one’s own prose.
BARBARA TUCHMAN