Quotes from Barbara Tuchman

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

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.

Their three outstanding attitudes-obliviousness to the growing disaffection of constituents, primacy of self-aggrandizement, illusion of invulnerable status-are persistent aspects of folly.

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.

Tuchman's Law: "The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to- tenfold." Barbara Tuchman Foreward to A Distant Mirror Published 1978

A historian cannot pick and choose his facts; he must deal with all the evidence.

Books} are the bankers of the treasures of the mind.

Once the divinity of doctrine has been questioned there is no return to perfect faith.

No nation in the world has so many drastic problems squeezed into so small a space, under such urgent pressure of time and heavy burden of history, as Israel.

The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.

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

When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.

War is the unfolding of miscalculations.

More than a code of manners in war and love, Chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life.

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.

Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.

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

Wisdom - meaning judgment acting on experience, common sense, available knowledge, and a decent appreciation of probability.

If wisdom in government eludes us, perhaps courage could substitute-the moral courage to terminate mistakes.

Government remains the paramount area of folly because it is there that men seek power over others - only to lose it over themselves.

Historians who stuff in every item of research they have found, every shoelace and telephone call of a biographical subject, are not doing the hard work of selecting and shaping a readable story.

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

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.