Quotes by Barbara W. Tuchman

“Books are humanity in print.”

“Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. They are engines of change, windows on the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time.”

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

“Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.”

“The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard.”

“Honor wears different coats to different eyes.”

“Rome had Caesar, a man of remarkable governing talents, although it must be said that a ruler who arouses opponents to resort to assassination is probably not as smart as he ought to be.”

“Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.”

“Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip and Germans, no less than other peoples, prepare for the last war.”

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

A reformer exhorted children that they would succeed where he and his colleagues had failed with the charge: Live for that better day.

Everything interested him and everything excited him.

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

Books are humanity in print.

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

Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex.

House Speaker Thomas Reed could destroy an argument or expose a fallacy in fewer words than anyone else. His language was vivid and picturesque. He had a way of phrasing things which was peculiarly apt and peculiarly his own.

Now according to German logic, a declaration of war was found to be unnecessary because of imaginary bombings

Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as the most flagrant of all passions.

Any person who considers himself, and intends to remain, a member of Western society inherits the Western past from Athens and Jerusalem to Runnymede and Valley Forge, as well as to Watts and Chicago of August 1968. He may ignore it or deny it, but that does not alter the fact. The past sits back and smiles and knows it owns him anyway.