Barbara Tuchman Quotes

From the very beginning, history wasn't content simply to be nostalgic fairytales; it wanted to make you think.

It may be enough to study history in all its nuance and ambiguity for its own sake. But there is no country free of the need to find new ways of reading the past as an inspiring way of thinking about everything else, including the present.

I don't think you learn specific lessons from history, but you do learn proportion.

It's hard to understand a moment in history when you are in it.

The comfortable thing about the study of history is that it inclines us to think hopefully of our own times.

History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species.

History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles.

I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history.

History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.

History after all is the true poetry.

We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.

But every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history.

Whatever can be noted historically can be found within history.

While writing books about the past, I think about the present. It's not intentional, but somehow my books end up being written under the sign of a political mood.

You're not a historian, but most historians will tell you that they make very discrete judgment as to what facts to omit in order to make their book into some shape, some length that can be managed.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

You can't say history teaches us this or that; it gives us more questions than answers, and many answers to every question.

Throughout the human experience people have read history because they felt that it was a pleasure and that it was in some way instructive. The profession of professor of history has taken it in a very different direction.

To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.

World history is a court of judgment.

I do enjoy history. That's one of the things that I love about acting is you get a chance to really dive into history and develop a real personal opinion about it.

While we read history we make history.

I don't think you should ever run from history. You should learn from it and embrace it.

I study history in order to give an interpretation.