Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced

Barbara W. Tuchman


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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.

[Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Nov. 1980), pp. 16-32]

Barbara W. Tuchman

Tags: books humanity civilization mind literature thought



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Honor wears different coats to different eyes.

Barbara W. Tuchman


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War is the unfolding of miscalculations.

Barbara W. Tuchman


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When it comes to leaders we have, if anything, a superabundance—hundreds of Pied Pipers…ready and anxious to lead the population. They are scurrying around, collecting consensus, gathering as wide an acceptance as possible. But what they are not doing, very notably, is standing still and saying, ' This is what I believe. This I will do and that I will not do. This is my code of behavior and that is outside it. This is excellent and that is trash.' There is an abdication of moral leadership in the sense of a general unwillingness to state standards….Of all the ills that our poor…society is heir to, the focal one, it seems to me, from which so much of our uneasiness and confusion derive, is the absence of standards. We are too unsure of ourselves to assert them, to stick by them, if necessary in the case of persons who occupy positions of authority, to impose them. We seem to be afflicted by a widespread and eroding reluctance to take any stand on any values, moral, behavioral or esthetic.

Barbara W. Tuchman


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The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history's clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.

Barbara W. Tuchman


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[T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death.

Barbara W. Tuchman


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When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.

Barbara W. Tuchman


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Books are humanity in print.

Barbara W. Tuchman

Tags: books humanity barbara print tuchman



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

Barbara W. Tuchman


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