Quotes from Barbara W. Tuchman

In the school building taken over by GQG, an unbridgeable gulf separated Operations, the Troisième Bureau, which occupied the class rooms, from Intelligence, the Deuxième Bureau, which was installed in the gymnasium with the apparatus pushed against the walls and the rings tied up to the ceiling. All day the Deuxième Bureau collected information, interrogated prisoners, deciphered documents, put together

This was not necessarily a deliberate effort to be offensive; it was normal for General Staff officers to be offensive.

These cumbersome vehicles were as convenient as if dinosaurs had survived to be used by cowboys for driving cattle

The hypothetical has its charm, but actual government is history.

The love of humanity does not prevent us from being good journalists.

Bethmann expressed concern for unity and exhorted the deputies to "be unanimous" in their decisions. "We shall be unanimous, Excellency," a spokesman for the Liberals replied obediently. The all-knowing Erzberger who, as rapporteur of the Military Affairs Committee and a close associate of the Chancellor, was considered to have his ear to Olympus, bustled among his fellow deputies assuring them that the Serbs would be beaten "by this time next Monday" and that everything was going well.

Fate represents the fulfillment of man's expectations of himself.

How much does a man's effort depend upon the age in which his work is cast? Pope Clement VII

That was the Battle of Mons. As the opening British engagement of what was to become the Great War, it became endowed in retrospect with every quality of greatness and was given a place in the British pantheon equal to the battles of Hastings and Agincourt. Legends like that of the Angels of Mons settled upon it. All its men were valorous and all its dead heroes.

He had become, through a combination of heritage and character, a keeper of the national conscience.

Contempt of the defeated for the victor, seemingly a perverse response, is a loser's sentiment—denying admission of its own fault or failure and believing itself robbed of victory by some malign mischance, as in sports when a gust of wind might divert the throw of a ball, giving victory to the opponent.

in the case of a Gascon seigneur of the 14th century who left 100 livres to "those whom I deflowered, if they can be found.

The Republic cured me of the Republic.

Something in me broke and I was never the same thereafter.

Impunity in such affairs was no longer a matter of course, for the King was Louis IX, a sovereign whose sense of rulership was equal to his piety.

He seemed less in need of a secretary than of someone to listen to him.

One corps had run out of wire altogether and was relying on mounted orderlies. The VIth Corps did not possess the key to the cipher used by the XIIIth. Consequently, Samsonov's orders were issued by wireless in clear.

It is a peculiar habit of Christianity to conceive the most compassionate and forgiving divinities and use them to sponsor atrocity.

Our misconception in viewing the past lies in assuming that doubt and fear, permit, protests, violence and hate were not equally present.

Comparing the aftermaths of the Black Death and of World War I, James Westfall Thompson found all the same complaints: economic chaos, social unrest, high prices, profiteering, depraved morals, lack of production, industrial indolence, frenetic gaiety, wild expenditure, luxury, debauchery, social and religious hysteria, greed, avarice, maladministration, decay of manners.

yet he represented that emotional choice a people makes to satisfy its craving for a leader.

Disdain of the reserves was augmented by the new doctrine of the offensive which, it was felt, could only be properly inculcated in active troops. To perform the irresistible onslaught of the attaque brusquée, symbolized by the bayonet charge, the essential quality was élan, and élan could not be expected of men settled in civilian life with family responsibilities. Reserves mixed with active troops would create "armies of decadence," incapable of the will to conquer.

William III died childless in 1702, in a fall when his horse stumbled over a molehill, an obstacle that seems as if it should have some philosophical significance but, as far as can be seen, does not.

We must put aside all commonplaces as to the responsibility of the aggressor.… Success alone justifies war.