Quotes from Barbara W. Tuchman

In this atmosphere of doubt why was the extreme risk approved? Partly because exasperation at the failure of all her efforts at intimidation had led to an all-or-nothing state of mind and a helpless yielding like Bethmann's by the civilians to the military.

Every repetition of the choice only hardened the issue.

People felt a sense of betrayal in the daily evidence of the gulf between what Christ's agents were supposed to be and what they had become.

The risk of leaving East Prussia, hearth of Junkerdom and the Hohenzollerns, to be held by only nine divisions was hard to accept, but Frederick the Great had said, "It is better to lose a province than split the forces with which one seeks victory," and nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.

He fought all proposals designed to increase the political power of the masses. When still

A man ahead of his time, Oresme suggested that the source of demons and specters could be the disease of melancholy.

To qualify as folly for this inquiry, the policy adopted must meet three criteria: it must have been perceived as counter-productive in its own time, not merely by hindsight. This is important, because all policy is determined by the mores of its age. "Nothing is more unfair," as an English historian has well said, "than to judge men of the past by the ideas of the present

the majority of Russians are materially better off than before, the cost in cruelty and tyranny has been no less and probably greater than under the czars. The French Revolution, great prototype of populist government, reverted rapidly to

the ruling class in a just society should be men apprenticed to the art of ruling, drawn from the rational and wise.

His solution, beautiful and unattainable, was philosopher-kings.

It may be taken as axiomatic that any statement of fact about the Middle Ages may (and probably will) be met by a statement of the opposite or a different version.

Had I known that these legs were to carry a Lord Chancellor, I would have taken better care of them when I was a lad. Duke of Grafton

To understand the popes we must look at the princes.

Stimulated by the enemy's presence on the Loire in the center of France, the nobles responded to the summons, whatever their sentiments toward the King. They came from Auvergne, Berry, Burgundy, Lorraine, Hainault, Artois, Vermandois, Picardy, Brittany, Normandy. "No knight and no squire remained at home," wrote the chroniclers; here was gathered "all the flower of France.

Far from a source of suffering, their adopted faith had been a source of power.

It is necessary to salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman pontiff.

von Kluck's cavalry reconnaissance, with that marvelous human capacity to see what you expect to see even if it is not there, duly reported the British to be disembarking at Ostend, Calais, and Dunkirk on August 13.

Why do we invest all our skills and resources in a contest for armed superiority which can never be attained for long enough to make it worth having, rather than in an effort to find a modus vivendi with our antagonist—that is to say, a way of living, not dying?

Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from none but self expect applause, He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes and keeps his self-made laws.

by To Kill a Mockingbird. At the top of the nonfiction list was My Life in Court by Louis Nizer. That week also saw the publication of one of the finest works of history

Policy was not reconsidered because the governing group had no habit of purposeful consultation.

Havoc in a given period does not cover all the people all the time, and though its effect is cumulative, the decline it drags behind takes time before it is recognized.

If not fighting, or attending the King, he was generally being held somewhere for ransom.

With her trade and marine gone, Britain would lose the East Indies next, and "then France will dictate to us more imperiously than ever we did to Ireland.