Barbara Tuchman

Barbara Tuchman
Barbara Wertheim Tuchmanwas an American historian and author. She won the Pulitzer Prize twice, for The Guns of August, a best-selling history of the prelude to and the first month of World War I, and Stilwell and the American Experience in China, a biography of General Joseph Stilwell...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionHistorian
Date of Birth30 January 1912
CountryUnited States of America
art church littles
The Church [in the 14th century] gave ceremony and dignity to lives that had little of either. It was the source of beauty and art to which all had some access and which many helped to create.
art ideas christianity
Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.
book artist fiction
I have always felt like an artist when I work on a book. I see no reason why the word should always be confined to writers of fiction and poetry.
art exercise imagination
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.
bankers books books-and-reading humanity treasures
Books are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.
writing conditions
I have always been in a condition in which I cannot not write.
writing sentences satisfying
Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence.
across alive arouse carry consciousness constantly desk die emotion image man phrase reader searches sees unless wants word writer writes
No writing comes alive unless the writer sees across his desk a reader, and searches constantly for the word or phrase which will carry the image he wants the reader to see, and arouse the emotion he wants him to feel. Without consciousness of a live reader, what a man writes will die on his page.
teaching learning faculty
Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced
eye honor different
Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
responsible forgiven persons
To be right and overruled is not forgiven to persons in responsible positions.
technology use purpose
For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use.
war sea history
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.
age needs bad-times
Human beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot.