Top 80 Barbara Tuchman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.”

— Barbara Tuchman

2. “Books are humanity in print.”

— Barbara Tuchman

3. “The power to command frequently causes failure to think.”

— Barbara Tuchman

4. “Wisdom – meaning judgment acting on experience, common sense, available knowledge, and a decent appreciation of probability.”

— Barbara Tuchman

5. “Above all, discard the irrelevant.”

— Barbara Tuchman

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

— Barbara Tuchman

7. “Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.”

— Barbara Tuchman

8. “Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence.”

— Barbara Tuchman

9. “The reality of a question is inevitably more complicated than we would like to suppose.”

— Barbara Tuchman

10. “The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.”

— Barbara Tuchman

11. “One must stop conducting research before one has finished. Otherwise, one will never stop and never finish.”

— Barbara Tuchman

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

— Barbara Tuchman

13. “Human behavior is timeless.”

— Barbara Tuchman

14. “When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.”

— Barbara Tuchman

15. “To be right and overruled is not forgiven to persons in responsible positions.”

— Barbara Tuchman

16. “War is the unfolding of miscalculations.”

— Barbara Tuchman

17. “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 They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.”

— Barbara Tuchman

18. “A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.”

— Barbara Tuchman

19. “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

20. “I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning to the end.”

— Barbara Tuchman

21. “In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.”

— Barbara Tuchman

22. “Honor wears different coats to different eyes.”

— Barbara Tuchman

23. “The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.”

— Barbara Tuchman

24. “For me, the card catalog has been a companion all my working life. To leave it is like leaving the house one was brought up in.”

— Barbara Tuchman

25. “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.”

— Barbara Tuchman

26. “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

27. “Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip.”

— Barbara Tuchman

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

— Barbara Tuchman

29. “Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced.”

— Barbara Tuchman

30. “In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.”

— Barbara Tuchman

31. “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

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

— Barbara Tuchman

33. “The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians...”

— Barbara Tuchman

34. “For most people reform meant relief from ecclesiastical extortions.”

— Barbara Tuchman

35. “The writer’s object is – or should be – to hold the reader’s attention.”

— Barbara Tuchman

36. “In the midst of events there is no perspective.”

— Barbara Tuchman

37. “Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.”

— Barbara Tuchman

38. “Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers – danger, death, and live ammunition.”

— Barbara Tuchman

39. “Friendship of a kind that cannot easily be reversed tomorrow must have its roots in common interests and shared beliefs.”

— Barbara Tuchman

40. “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

41. “Words are seductive and dangerous material, to be used with caution.”

— Barbara Tuchman

42. “The story and study of the past, both recent and distant, will not reveal the future, but it flashes beacon lights along the way and it is a useful nostrum against despair.”

— Barbara Tuchman

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

— Barbara Tuchman

44. “Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.”

— Barbara Tuchman

45. “To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.”

— Barbara Tuchman

46. “Belgium, where there occurred one of the rare appearances of the hero in history, was lifted above herself by the uncomplicated conscience of her King and, faced with the choice to acquiesce or resist, took less than three hours to make her decision, knowing it might be mortal.”

— Barbara Tuchman

47. “I ask myself, have nations ever declined from a loss of moral sense rather than from physical reasons or the pressure of barbarians? I think that they have.”

— Barbara Tuchman

48. “What his imagination is to the poet, facts are to the historian. His exercise of judgment comes in their selection, his art in their arrangement.”

— Barbara Tuchman

49. “That conflict between the reach for the divine and the lure of earthly things was to be the central problem of the Middle Ages.”

— Barbara Tuchman

50. “To put away one’s own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.”

— Barbara Tuchman