Barbara Tuchman quotes - page 3

To admit error and cut losses is rare among individuals, unknown among states. (Barbara Tuchman)
The real reason for his attitude lay deeper. Essentially, Gloucester and the barons of his party were opposed to peace because they felt war to be their occupation. Behind them were the poorer knights and squires and archers of England, who, unconcerned with rights or wrongs, were "inclined to war such as had been their livelihood.”. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
Chroniclers habitually matched numbers to the awesomeness of the event. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex. As long as combat was desirable as the source of honor and glory, the knight had no wish to share it with the commoner, even for the sake of success. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
Books are humanity in print. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
Books are the carriers of civilization... Books are humanity in print. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
The reality of a question is inevitably more complicated than we would like to suppose. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
Diplomacy means all the wicked devices of the Old World, spheres of influence, balances of power, secret treaties, triple alliances, and, during the interim period, appeasement of Fascism. (Barbara Tuchman)
Honor wears different coats to different eyes. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
The fact of being reported increases the apparent extent of a deplorable development by a factor of ten. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
If a man is a writer, everybody tiptoes around past the locked door of the breadwinner. But if you're an ordinary female housewife, people say, 'This is just something Barbara wanted to do; it's not professional.' View quote
Barbara Tuchman
After the war, when my husband came home, we had two more children, and domesticity for a while prevailed combined with beginning the work I had always wanted to do, which was writing a book. View quote
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. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening-on a lucky day-without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. This has led me to formulate Tuchman's Law, as follows: "The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold" View quote
Barbara Tuchman
Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
To put away one's own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost. (Barbara Tuchman)
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. View quote
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. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
Clausewitz, a dead Prussian, and Norman Angell, a living if misunderstood professor, had combined to fasten the short-war concept upon the European mind. Quick, decisive victory was the German orthodoxy. View quote
Barbara Tuchman