Barbara W. Tuchman Quotes

Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government.

Our misconception in viewing the past lies in assuming that doubt and fear, permit, protests, violence and hate were not equally present.

He had been present in their minds not as a man but as an idea.

When meeting criticism, he would regard it not as something to resent but as a thing to be examined, like an interesting beetle. "That's a curious view, not uninteresting.

Policy was not reconsidered because the governing group had no habit of purposeful consultation.

He seemed less in need of a secretary than of someone to listen to him.

The fate of warnings in political affairs is to be futile when the recipient wishes otherwise.

He was always acting, always enveloping himself in artificiality, perhaps to conceal the volcano within.

House speaker Thomas read could see the trend, but he could not have changed himself.

Folly is a child of power.

In proportion that property is small, the danger of misusing the franchisee is great.

As there would be no more inheritance, there would be no more greed. Peter Kropotkin

How much does a man's effort depend upon the age in which his work is cast? Pope Clement VII

No less a bold and pugnacious figure than Winston Churchill broke down and was unable to finish his remarks at the sendoff of the British Expeditionary Force into the maelstrom of World War I in Europe.

I will only mention that the independent power of words to affect the writing of history is a thing to be watched out for. They have an almost frightening autonomous power to produce in the mind of the reader an image or idea that was not in the mind of the writer. Obviously they operate this way in all forms of writing, but history is particularly sensitive because one has a duty to be accurate, and careless use of words can leave a false impression one had not intended.

If the historian will submit himself to his material instead of trying to impose himself on his material, then the material will ultimately speak to him and supply the answers.

Civilians who volunteer generally wish to escape, not to share, privatizations worse than their own.

Now according to German logic, a declaration of war was found to be unnecessary because of imaginary bombings

Enormity of the stakes became the new self-hypnosis.

No single characteristic ever overtakes an entire society.

The process of gaining power employs means which degrade or brutalize the seeker, who awakes to find that power has been possessed at the cost of virtue or moral purpose lost.

Prison does not silence ideas whose time has come.

The affair made men feel larger than life.

A minister's (cabinet member's) function was not to DO the work but to see that it got done.

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