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Barbara Tuchman

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16 Quotes by Barbara Tuchman

  1. 1.

    Honor wears different coats to different eyes.

    Barbara Tuchman

  2. 2.

    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.

    Barbara Tuchman

  3. 3.

    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

  4. 4.

    Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.

    Barbara Tuchman

  5. 5.

    Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip.

    Barbara Tuchman

  6. 6.

    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.

    Barbara Tuchman

  7. 7.

    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

  8. 8.

    To put away one’s own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.

    Barbara Tuchman

  9. 9.

    Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.

    Barbara Tuchman

  10. 10.

    To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.

    Barbara Tuchman

  11. 11.

    Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.

    Barbara Tuchman

  12. 12.

    War is the unfolding of miscalculations.

    Barbara Tuchman

  13. 13.

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

    Barbara Tuchman

  14. 14.

    The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard.

    Barbara Tuchman

  15. 15.

    Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.

    Barbara Tuchman

  16. 16.

    Books are humanity in print.

    Barbara Tuchman