Barbara Tuchman quotes

" Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip. " # Writers and Writing # Death and Dying # Mind

" History is the unfolding of miscalculation. " # Mistakes # History and Historians # Life and Living

" 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 They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents. " # Libraries # Books - Reading # Writers and Writing

" Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed. " # Revolutions and Revolutionaries # Tyranny # Success

" Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. " # Language # Books - Reading # Literature

" 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. " # Diplomacy # Alliances # Fascism

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

" No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision. " # Government # Freedom # Power

" The open frontier, the hardships of homesteading from scratch, the wealth of natural resources, the whole vast challenge of a continent waiting to be exploited, combined to produce a prevailing materialism and an American drive bent as much, if not more, on money, property, and power than was true of the Old World from which we had fled. " # New World # Money # Power

" To put away one's own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost. " # Originality # Books - Reading # Sin