Books are the carriers of civilization… Books are humanity in print.
BARBARA TUCHMANBooks are the carriers of civilization… Books are humanity in print.
BARBARA TUCHMANWithout books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.
BARBARA TUCHMANsatire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
BARBARA TUCHMANI want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning to the end.
BARBARA TUCHMANThe 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.
BARBARA TUCHMANThe reality of a question is inevitably more complicated than we would like to suppose.
BARBARA TUCHMANIt is wiser, I believe, to arrive at theory by way of evidence rather than the other way around…. It is more rewarding, in any case, to assemble the facts first and, in the process of arranging them in narrative form, to discover a theory or a historical generalization emerging of its own accord.
BARBARA TUCHMANModern historians have suggested that in his last years he (Richard II) was overtaken by mental disease, but that is only a modern view of the malfunction common to 14th century rulers: inability to inhibit impulse.
BARBARA TUCHMANTo a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
BARBARA TUCHMANA phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.
BARBARA TUCHMANThe writer’s object is – or should be – to hold the reader’s attention.
BARBARA TUCHMANThe Germans could not get over the perfidy of it. It was unbelievable that the English, having degenerated to the stage where suffragettes heckled the Prime Minister and defied the police, were going to fight.
BARBARA TUCHMANThe costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
BARBARA TUCHMANCompleteness is rare in history.
BARBARA TUCHMANBusiness offers a kind of power, but only to the very successful at the top, and without the dominion and titles and red carpets and motorcycle escorts of public office.
BARBARA TUCHMANThe Hundred Years’ War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity.
BARBARA TUCHMAN