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Barbara W. Tuchman Quotes | Quotes said by Barbara W. Tuchman

  • Barbara W. Tuchman Quote #1

    A great imperative imparts a wonderful impulse to the spirit.


  • Barbara W. Tuchman Quote #2

    A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests. Mankind, it seems, makes a poorer performance of government than of almost any other human activity. In this sphere, wisdom, which may be defined as the exercise of judgment acting on experience, common sense and available information, is less operative and more frustrated than it should be. Why do holders of high office so often act contrary to the way reason points and enlightened self-interest suggests? Why does intelligent mental process seem so often not to function?

  • Barbara W. Tuchman Quote #3

    An event of great agony is bearable only in the belief that it will bring about a better world. When it does not, as in the aftermath of another vast calamity in 1914-18, disillusion is deep and moves on to self-doubt and self-disgust.

  • Barbara W. Tuchman Quote #4

    Awful momentum makes carrying through easier than calling off folly.

  • Barbara W. Tuchman Quote #5

    Books are ... companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of mind. Books are humanity in print.

  • Barbara W. Tuchman Quote #6

    Books are humanity in print.

  • Barbara W. Tuchman Quote #7

    Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

  • Barbara W. Tuchman Quote #8

    Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.

    [Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Nov. 1980), pp. 16-32]

  • Barbara W. Tuchman Quote #9

    Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as the most flagrant of all passions.

  • Barbara W. Tuchman Quote #10

    Civilians who volunteer generally wish to escape, not to share, privatizations worse than their own.

  • Barbara W. Tuchman Quote #11

    Clearly prize money received more serious attention than scurvy or signals.

  • Barbara W. Tuchman Quote #12

    Confronted by menace or what is perceived as menace, governments will usually attempt to smash it, rarely to examine it, understand it, and drefine it.

  • Barbara W. Tuchman Quote #13

    Connection was the cement of the governing class.

  • Barbara W. Tuchman Quote #14

    Disorder is the least tolerable up sinful conditions.

  • Barbara W. Tuchman Quote #15

    Enormity of the stakes became the new self-hypnosis.

  • Barbara W. Tuchman Quote #16

    Extravagant sartorial display had a purpose. It created the impression of wealth and power on the opponent and pride in the wearer which has been lost sight of in our nervously egalitarian times.

  • Barbara W. Tuchman Quote #17

    Far from a source of suffering, their adopted faith had been a source of power.

  • Barbara W. Tuchman Quote #18

    Folly is a child of power.

  • Barbara W. Tuchman Quote #19

    Government was rarely more than a choice between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

  • Barbara W. Tuchman Quote #20

    He had the ruthlessness of uninterrupted success.

  • Barbara W. Tuchman Quote #21

    He never hears the truth about himself by not wishing to hear it. Pope Alexander

  • Barbara W. Tuchman Quote #22

    He wanted AFFIRMATION rather than INFORMATION.

  • Barbara W. Tuchman Quote #23

    He was always acting, always enveloping himself in artificiality, perhaps to conceal the volcano within.

  • Barbara W. Tuchman Quote #24

    How much does a man's effort depend upon the age in which his work is cast? Pope Clement VII

  • Barbara W. Tuchman Quote #25

    Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers - danger, death, and live ammunition.

  • Barbara W. Tuchman Quote #26

    In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.

  • Barbara W. Tuchman Quote #27

    Irritability was an occupational disease. Intolerant and intolerable belong in the same category.

  • Barbara W. Tuchman Quote #28

    Let us retreat when we can, not when we must. Lord Chatham

  • Barbara W. Tuchman Quote #29

    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.

  • Barbara W. Tuchman Quote #30

    No one is is sure of his premise as the man who knows too little.

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