Barbara Tuchman

Barbara Tuchman
Barbara Wertheim Tuchmanwas an American historian and author. She won the Pulitzer Prize twice, for The Guns of August, a best-selling history of the prelude to and the first month of World War I, and Stilwell and the American Experience in China, a biography of General Joseph Stilwell...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionHistorian
Date of Birth30 January 1912
CountryUnited States of America
teacher book humanity
Books are ... companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of mind. Books are humanity in print.
book civilization literature-history
Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.
book artist fiction
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.
book communication quality
To be a bestseller is not necessarily a measure of quality, but it is a measure of communication.
book two cooking
To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.
teacher book sea
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.
eye honor different
Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
technology use purpose
For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use.
age needs bad-times
Human beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot.
missing ingredients danger
Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers - danger, death, and live ammunition.
government decision faces
No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.
children light law
To ensure that no one gained an advantage over anyone else, commercial law [in the 14th century] prohibited innovation in tools or techniques, underselling below a fixed price, working late by artificial light, employing extra apprentices or wife and underage children, and advertising of wares or praising them to the detriment of others.
women worry desire
The nastiness of women [in the 14th century] was generally perceived at the close of life when a man began to worry about hell, and his sexual desire in any case fading.
reality complicated
The reality of a question is inevitably more complicated than we would like to suppose.