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
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.
seductive used dangerous
Words are seductive and dangerous material, to be used with caution.
teaching learning faculty
Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced
eye honor different
Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
responsible forgiven persons
To be right and overruled is not forgiven to persons in responsible positions.
age needs bad-times
Human beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot.
teacher book humanity
Books are ... companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of mind. Books are humanity in print.
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.
spring war autumn
When every autumn people said it could not last through the winter, and when every spring there was still no end in sight, only the hope that out of it all some good would accrue to mankind kept men and nations fighting. When at last it was over, the war had many diverse results and one dominant one transcending all others: disillusion.
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.
book order original-thought
To put away one's own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.
real gaps breaking-down
When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.
waiting challenges scratches
The open frontier, the hardships of homesteading from scratch, the wealth of natural resources, the whole vast challenge of a continent waiting to be exploited, combined to produce a prevailing materialism and an American drive bent as much, if not more, on money, property, and power than was true of the Old World from which we had fled.
past tree old-friends
The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard