Quote

To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.

Barbara Tuchman

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Barbara Tuchman
Food
Even
Libraries
Muse
Shelter
Historian
Library

More quotes by Barbara Tuchman

Image
The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government, and when combined with a position of power even more so.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
In America, where the electoral process is drowning in commercial techniques of fund-raising and image-making, we may have completed a circle back to a selection process as unconcerned with qualifications as that which made Darius King of Persia. ... he whose horse was the first to neigh at sunrise should be King.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
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.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
One must stop conducting research before one has finished. Otherwise, one will never stop and never finish.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
No female iniquity was more severely condemned than the habit of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten the forehead.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
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
Image
bureaucracy, safely repeating today what it did yesterday, rolls on as ineluctably as some vast computer, which, once penetrated by error, duplicates it forever.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
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
Image
Russians, in the knowledge of inexhaustible supplies of manpower, are accustomed to accepting gigantic fatalities with comparative calm.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
Completeness is rare in history.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
Woman was the Church's rival, the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the Devil's decoy.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
No economic activity was more irrepressible [in the 14th century] than the investment and lending at interest of money it was the basis for the rise of the Western capitalist economy and the building of private fortunes-and it was based on the sin of usury.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
Of all the ills that our poor ... society is heir to, the focal one, it seems to me, from which so much of our uneasiness and confusion derive, is the absence of standards.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
Books are humanity in print.
Barbara Tuchman
Image
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