145 Quotes by Barbara Tuchman

Nothing can stop an enemy from picking wireless messages out of the free air - and nothing did.

[Blinker] Hall, operating on the quaint theory that the Navy might be needed for battle and that whatever increased the ship's efficiency was a criterion for change, had continued trampling on the toes of orthodoxy.

Only Nicky [Nicholas Romanov II], the Czar, was [Kaiser Wilhelm]'s friend, neither clever nor strong like himself, but at least malleable.

Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female.

Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts.

The social damage was not in the failure but in the undertaking, which was expensive. The cost of war was the poison running through the 14th century.

If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.

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.

His (Deschamps') complaint of court life was the same as is made of government at the top in any age: it was composed of hypocrisy, flattery, lying, paying and betraying; it was where calumny and cupidity reigned, common sense lacked, truth dared not appear, and where to survive one had to be deaf, blind, and dumb.