After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening, on a lucky day, without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena.
Barbara TuchmanThe fact of being reported increases the apparent extent of a deplorable development by a factor of ten.
Barbara TuchmanWhen people don't have an objective, there's much less dynamic effort, and that makes life a lot less interesting.
Barbara TuchmanI have always felt like an artist when I work on a book. I see no reason why the word should always be confined to writers of fiction and poetry.
Barbara TuchmanIt hurt the economic historians, the Marxists and the fabians, to admit that the Ten Hour Bill, the basic piece of 19th century legislation, came down from the top, out of aa nobleman's private feelings about the Gospel, or that the abolition of the slave trade was achieved, not through the operation of some "law" of profit and loss, but peurlet as the result of tyhe new humanitarianism of the Evangelicals.
Barbara Tuchman