145 Quotes by Barbara Tuchman

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

Whatever solace the Christian faith could give was balanced by the anxiety it generated.

The writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention.

In the midst of events there is no perspective.

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

I have always felt like an artist when I work on a book. I see no reason why the word should always be confined to writers of fiction and poetry.

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

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

In the search for meaning we must not forget that the gods (or God, for that matter) are a concept of the human mind; they are the creatures of man, not vice versa. They are needed and invented to give meaning and purpose to the struggle that is life on Earth, to explain strange and irregular phenomena of nature, haphazard events and, above all, irrational human conduct. They exist to bear the burden of all things that cannot be comprehended except by supernatural intervention or design.