Quotes from Barbara W. Tuchman

No one dared tell the outcome of the battle to Philip VI until his jester was thrust forward and said, "Oh, the cowardly English, the cowardly English!" and on being asked why, replied, "They did not jump overboard like our brave Frenchmen." The King evidently got the point. The fish drank so much French blood, it was said afterward, that if God had given them the power of speech they would have spoken in French.

Its insistent principle that the life of the spirit and of the afterworld was superior to the here and now, to material life on earth, is one that the modern world does not share, no matter how devout some present-day Christians may be. The rupture of this principle and its replacement by belief in the worth of the individual and of an active life not necessarily focused on God is, in fact, what created the modern world and ended the Middle Ages.

Man himself was the formulator of the impossible Christian ideal and tried to uphold it, if not live by it, for more than a millennium. Therefore it must represent a need, something more fundamental than Gibbon's 18th century enlightenment allowed for, or his elegant ironies could dispose of.

Alexander Guchkov, a subsequent Minister of War, testified that he "reached the firm conviction that the war was lost" after Tannenberg. The defeat gave new vigor to the pro-German groups who began openly to agitate for withdrawal from the war. Count Witte was convinced the war would ruin Russia, Rasputin that it would destroy the regime.

The Englishman, as an American observed, felt himself the best-governed citizen in the world, even when in opposition he believed the incumbents were ruining the country.

was compared by Dante to both a slave and a brothel.

Washington's incessant need for NEW assessments testifies to uncertainty in the capital.

The persistence of the normal is strong.

it is reassuring to know that the human species has lived through worse before.

it was manifest that a malady of such horrors, stenches, and agonies, and especially one bringing the dismal despair that settled upon its victims before they died, was not a plague "natural" to mankind but "a chastisement from Heaven.

History never repeats itself," said Voltaire; "man always does." Thucydides, of course, made that principle the justification of his work.

What made the Schlieffen plan was not Clausewitz and the Battle of Cannae, but the body of accumulated egoism which suckled the German people and created a nation fed on "the desperate delusion of the will that deems itself absolute.

Besides, life was not precious, for what was the body after all, but carrion, and the sojourn on earth but a halt on the way to eternal life?

leaving Europe with a population reduced by about 40 percent in 1380 and by nearly 50 percent at the end of the century.

No Pope ever issued a Bull to approve of something.

Tuchman's Law, as follows: "The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold

Nothing is more unfair," as an English historian has well said, "than to judge men of the past by the ideas of the present. Whatever may be said of morality, political wisdom is certainly ambulatory.

insistent principle that the life of the spirit and of the afterworld was superior to the here and now, to material life on earth,

House Speaker Thomas Reed could destroy an argument or expose a fallacy in fewer words than anyone else. His language was vivid and picturesque. He had a way of phrasing things which was peculiarly apt and peculiarly his own.

An event of great agony is bearable only in the belief that it will bring about a better world. When it does not, as in the aftermath of another vast calamity in 1914–18, disillusion is deep and moves on to self-doubt and self-disgust. In

I need no Chief," said the Kaiser; "I can do this for myself.

the Regents' dislike of the social "leveling" they sensed in the Revolution was stronger.

Ending a war is a difficult and delicate business. Even intelligent rulers, when they exist, often find themselves unable to terminate a war, should they want to. Each side must become convinced at the same time and with equal certainty that its war aim is either not achievable or not worth the cost or damage to the state.

the inadvertent by-product of the nobles' passionate pursuit of war.