Quotes by Barbara Tuchman

• Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
• No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
• Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.
• The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard.
• Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
• Books are humanity in print.
• War is the unfolding of miscalculations.
• Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
• To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
• Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip.
• To put away one's own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.
• Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.