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

Categorized in : War Spring Hope

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.

Barbara Tuchman

sea teacher book

Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government, and when combined with a position of power even more so.

Barbara Tuchman

strong power thinking

Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts.

Barbara Tuchman

government self thinking

Books are humanity in print.

Barbara Tuchman

print humanity book

Policy is formed by preconceptions, by long implanted biases. When information is relayed to policy-makers, they respond in terms of what is already inside their heads and consequently make policy less to fit the facts than to fit the notions and intentions formed out of the mental baggage that has accumulated in their minds since childhood.

Barbara Tuchman

childhood government long

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

horse government kings

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

Barbara Tuchman

reading stupid book

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

folly power men

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

imagination exercise art

War is the unfolding of miscalculations.

Barbara Tuchman

military war peace

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

Barbara Tuchman

conducting finished research

Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as "the most flagrant of all the passions." Because it can only be satisfied by power over others, government is its favorite field of exercise. Business offers a kind of power, but only to the very successful at the top, and without the dominion and titles and red carpets and motorcycle escorts of public office.

Barbara Tuchman

passion successful exercise

The power to command frequently causes failure to think.

Barbara Tuchman

command causes thinking

In the search for meaning we must not forget that the gods (or God, for that matter) are a concept of the human mind; they are the creatures of man, not vice versa. They are needed and invented to give meaning and purpose to the struggle that is life on Earth, to explain strange and irregular phenomena of nature, haphazard events and, above all, irrational human conduct. They exist to bear the burden of all things that cannot be comprehended except by supernatural intervention or design.

Barbara Tuchman

struggle giving men

An essential element for good writing is a good ear: One must listen to the sound of one's own prose.

Barbara Tuchman

essentials sound writing

The better part of valor is to spend it learning to live with differences, however hostile, unless and until we can find another planet.

Barbara Tuchman

planets conflict differences

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

Barbara Tuchman

seductive dangerous used

In April 1917 the illusion of isolation was destroyed, America came to the end of innocence, and of the exuberant freedom of bachelor independence. That the responsibilities of world power have not made us happier is no surprise. To help ourselves manage them, we have replaced the illusion of isolation with a new illusion of omnipotence.

Barbara Tuchman

omnipotence responsibility america

One constant among the elements of 1914—as of any era—was the disposition of everyone on all sides not to prepare for the harder alternative, not to act upon what they suspected to be true.

Barbara Tuchman

eras alternatives elements

The writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention.

Barbara Tuchman

reader should attention