Wooden-headedness consists of assessing a situation in terms of preconceived, fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be confused by the facts.
Barbara W. Tuchman (1912-1989) American historian and author
“An Inquiry into the Persistence of Unwisdom in Government,” Esquire (1980)
Quotations by:
Tuchman, Barbara
The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard.
Barbara W. Tuchman (1912-1989) American historian and author
“Can History Be Served Up Hot?” New York Times (8 Mar 1964)
(Source)
The contemporary has no perspective; everything is in the foreground and appears the same size. Little matters loom big, and great matters are sometimes missed because their outlines cannot be seen. Vietnam and Panama are given four-column headlines today, but the historian 50 or 100 years hence will put them in a chapter under a general heading we have not yet thought of.
Barbara W. Tuchman (1912-1989) American historian and author
“Can History Be Served Up Hot?” New York Times (8 Mar 1964)
(Source)
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
Barbara W. Tuchman (1912-1989) American historian and author
“Papyrus to Paperbacks: The World That Books Made,” Washington Post (30 Dec 1979)
(Source)
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. The 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.
Barbara W. Tuchman (1912-1989) American historian and author
“The Book,” Lecture, Library of Congress (17 Oct 1979)
(Source)
Reprinted in Authors' League Bulletin (Nov-Dec 1979)
To a historian, libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
Barbara W. Tuchman (1912-1989) American historian and author
“The Houses of Research,” Authors Guild Bulletin (Mar 1972)
(Source)
Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
Barbara W. Tuchman (1912-1989) American historian and author
(Attributed)
Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female.
Barbara W. Tuchman (1912-1989) American historian and author
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, ch. 9 (1978)
(Source)
When the gap between the ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.
Barbara W. Tuchman (1912-1989) American historian and author
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, Foreward (1978)
(Source)
In the midst of events there is no perspective.
Barbara W. Tuchman (1912-1989) American historian and author
A Distant Mirror (1978)
This was unwise, but if autocrats always acted wisely they would not furnish history with moral lessons.
Barbara W. Tuchman (1912-1989) American historian and author
A Distant Mirror, ch. 21 “The Fiction Cracks” (1978)
(Source)
On young King Richard II's giving substantial offices and lands to his friend and mentor, the Earl of Oxford, in so doing making an enemy of the Duke of Gloucester.
Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
Barbara W. Tuchman (1912-1989) American historian and author
Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-1945, ch. 8 (1972)
(Source)
Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
Barbara W. Tuchman (1912-1989) American historian and author
The Guns of August (1962)
On the defense of coastline prior to an outbreak of war.
War is the unfolding of miscalculations.
Barbara W. Tuchman (1912-1989) American historian and author
The Guns of August (1962)
In Stilwell and the American Experience in China (1970), she gave this as "History is the unfolding of miscalculations."
Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip.
Barbara W. Tuchman (1912-1989) American historian and author
The Guns of August, ch. 2 (1962)
Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
Barbara W. Tuchman (1912-1989) American historian and author
The Guns of August, ch. 7 (1962)
(Source)
No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast, and specific decision.
Barbara W. Tuchman (1912-1989) American historian and author
The Guns of August, ch. 9 (1962)
Folly is a child of power. We all know, from unending repetitions of Lord Acton’s dictum, that power corrupts. We are less less aware that it breeds folly: that the power to command frequently causes failure to think: that the responsibility of power often fades as its exercise augments.
To search for meaning we must not forget that the gods (or God, for that matter) are a concept of the human mind; they are the creatures of man, not vice-versa. They are invented to give meaning and purpose to the puzzle that is life on earth, to explain strange and irregular phenomena of nature, haphazard events, and, above all, irrational human conduct. They exist to bear the burden of all the things that cannot be comprehended except by supernatural intervention or design.
Barbara W. Tuchman (1912-1989) American historian and author
The March of Folly: from Troy to Vietnam, ch. 2 (1984)
(Source)