Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
Category Archive: Barbara Tuchman
To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.
War is the unfolding of miscalculations.
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.
Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
To put away one’s own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.
Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip.
Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard.