Quotes from Barbara Tuchman

Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government, and when combined with a position of power even more so.

If all were equalized by death, as the medieval idea constantly emphasized, was it not possible that inequalities on earth were contrary to the will of God?

If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.

Honor wears different coats to different eyes.

Books are the carriers of civilization... Books are humanity in print.

What his imagination is to the poet, facts are to the historian. His exercise of judgment comes in their selection, his art in their arrangement.

The better part of valor is to spend it learning to live with differences, however hostile, unless and until we can find another planet.

Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced

Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.

When people don't have an objective, there's much less dynamic effort, and that makes life a lot less interesting.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

History is the unfolding of miscalculation.

War is the unfolding of miscalculations.

Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced

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

Of the two classes of Prussian officer, the bull-necked and the wasp-waisted, he belonged to the second. Monocled and effete in appearance, cold and distant in manner, he concentrated with such single-mindedness on his profession that when an aide, at the end of an all-night staff ride in East Prussia, pointed out to him the beauty of the river Pregel sparkling in the rising sun, the General gave a brief, hard look and replied, 'An unimportant obstacle.

The story and study of the past, both recent and distant, will not reveal the future, but it flashes beacon lights along the way and it is a useful nostrum against despair.

The reality of a question is inevitably more complicated than we would like to suppose.