Barbara Tuchman Quotations

Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced

Honor wears different coats to different eyes.

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

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

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.

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

Books are ... companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of mind. Books are humanity in print.

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

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.

No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.