“The writer of history, I believe, has a number of duties vis-à-vis the reader, if he wants to keep him reading. The first is to distill. He must do the preliminary work for the reader, assemble the information, make sense of it, select the essential, discard the irrelevant- above all, discard the irrelevant - and put the rest together so that it forms a developing dramatic narrative. Narrative, it has been said , is the lifeblood of history. To offer a mass of undigested facts, of names not identified and places not located, is of no use to the reader and is simple laziness on the part of the author, or pedantry to show how much he has read.”
“The writer of history, I believe, has a number of duties vis-à-vis the reader, if he wants to keep him reading. The first is to distill. He must do the preliminary work for the reader, assemble the information, make sense of it, select the essential, discard the irrelevant- above all, discard the irrelevant - and put the rest together so that it forms a developing dramatic narrative. Narrative, it has been said , is the lifeblood of history. To offer a mass of undigested facts, of names not identified and places not located, is of no use to the reader and is simple laziness on the part of the author, or pedantry to show how much he has read.”
Barbara W. Tuchman
“Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.”
Barbara W. Tuchman“Books are ... companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of mind. Books are humanity in print.”
Barbara W. Tuchman“Extravagant sartorial display had a purpose. It created the impression of wealth and power on the opponent and pride in the wearer which has been lost sight of in our nervously egalitarian times.”
Barbara W. Tuchman, The First Salute“Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.”
Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August“Civilians who volunteer generally wish to escape, not to share, privatizations worse than their own.”
Barbara W. Tuchman, The First Salute“Clearly prize money received more serious attention than scurvy or signals.”
Barbara W. Tuchman, The First Salute“The greatness of the object enabled my mind to support what my strengths of body was scarce equal to.”
Barbara W. Tuchman, The First Salute“These cumbersome vehicles were as convenient as if dinosaurs had survived to be used by cowboys for driving cattle”
Barbara W. Tuchman, The First SaluteAll in One Creative & Marketing Platform to tell stories at scale
