Quotes from Barbara W. Tuchman

If a man is a writer, everybody tiptoes around past the locked door of the breadwinner. But if you're an ordinary female housewife, people say, 'This is just something Barbara wanted to do; it's not professional.'

Books are humanity in print.

After the war, when my husband came home, we had two more children, and domesticity for a while prevailed combined with beginning the work I had always wanted to do, which was writing a book.

They resented the patronage they depended upon.

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

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.

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

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

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

When the children were very small, I worked in the morning only, and then gradually, as they spent full days at school, I could spend full days at work.

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

Human beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot.

When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.

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

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

For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use.

The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history's clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.

Books are humanity in print.

in the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight

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

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.

Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.

Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex.

The writer's object should be to hold the reader's attention. I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning until the end. This is accomplished only when the narrative moves steadily ahead, not when it comes to a weary standstill, overloaded with every item uncovered in the research.