Barbara Tuchman Quotes
To put away one's own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.
This was an observation and statement that made many conservatives unhappy with a figure who was usually their hero. However, Mises observed correctly, that any reactionary is supporting and defending what he/she perceives is the best of the past. But by definition the ideas are of the past and are the intellectual product of others. Therefore the ideas she espouses are never hers. The reactionary is intellectual dependent on the past. In contrast, liberals, progressives and radicals MIGHT be intellectually independent. A few are, but most echo their ideas. But the reactionary can never be intellectually independent.
Barbara Wertheim Tuchman was an American historian and author. She won the Pulitzer Prize twice, for The Guns of August (1962), a best-selling history of the prelude to and the first month of World War I, and Stilwell and the American Experience in China (1971), a biography of General Joseph Stilwell.
