Books are humanity in print. — Barbara Tuchman

Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled. — Barbara Tuchman

Books are the carriers of civilization… Books are humanity in print. — Barbara Tuchman

Books are … companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of mind. Books are humanity in print. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Books are the carriers of civilization…They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Books are the carriers of civilization. without Books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. — Barbara Tuchman

To put away one’s own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost. — Barbara Tuchman

Completeness is rare in history. — Barbara Tuchman

The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians. — Barbara Tuchman

History is the unfolding of miscalculation. — Barbara Tuchman

A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests. — Barbara Tuchman

Human beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot. — Barbara Tuchman

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. — Barbara Tuchman

Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general. — Barbara Tuchman

Strong prejudices in an ill–formed mind are hazardous to government. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible. — Barbara Tuchman

Prison does not silence ideas whose time has come. — Barbara W. Tuchman

To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup. — Barbara Tuchman

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

The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive. — Barbara Tuchman

The power to command frequently causes failure to think. — Barbara Tuchman

If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements,corrupts even more. — Barbara Tuchman

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

Diplomacy means all the wicked devices of the Old World, spheres of influence, balances of power, secret treaties, triple alliances, and, during the interim period, appeasement of Fascism. — Barbara Tuchman

Had all the world been a school and Wilson its principal, he would have been the greatest statesman in history. — Barbara W. Tuchman

To gain victory over the flesh was the purpose of fasting and celibacy, which denied the pleasures of this world for the sake of reward in the next. — Barbara Tuchman

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. — Barbara Tuchman

Satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality. — Barbara Tuchman

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? — Barbara Tuchman

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

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

When the children were very small, I worked in the morning only, and then gradually, as they spent full days at school, I could spend full days at work. — Barbara W. Tuchman

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. — Barbara Tuchman

After the war, when my husband came home, we had two more children, and domesticity for a while prevailed combined with beginning the work I had always wanted to do, which was writing a book. — Barbara W. Tuchman

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. — Barbara Tuchman

Money was the crux. Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself. — Barbara Tuchman

The social damage was not in the failure but in the undertaking, which was expensive. The cost of war was the poison running through the 14th century. — Barbara Tuchman

That the Jews were unholy was a belief so ingrained by the Church [by the 14th century] that the most devout persons were the harshest in their antipathy, none more so than St. Louis. — Barbara Tuchman

For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use. — Barbara Tuchman

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. — Barbara Tuchman

T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death. — Barbara Tuchman

The Church [in the 14th century] gave ceremony and dignity to lives that had little of either. It was the source of beauty and art to which all had some access and which many helped to create. — Barbara Tuchman