Quotes from Barbara W. Tuchman

By such accident of the human mind, war, trade, and history are shaped. The

As in older and later empires, resources were not equal to the overextension of the imperial reach.

If Joffre's plan were to work, it was essential that the BEF hold the space between Lanrezac and the newly forming Sixth Army. Under General Order No. 2 Joffre intended the BEF to conform to the general pace of the retreat and, once they reached the Somme at St. Quentin, hold firm.

The Brunswick Manifesto, rather than accomplishing Louis XVI's rescue, paved the way to the guillotine, which could have been foreseen if Karl Wilhelm had given the matter any forethought, but thinking ahead is given to chess players, not to autocrats.

Adams, not yet replaced, repeated that "the arrogant English were treating Amsterdam exactly as they had Boston." With that fatal gift for the unlearned lesson, the produced the same result - unity against the oppressor, which in America had brought the fractious colonies into their first federation.

Everything took on the color of blood.

The tribal pull of patriotism could have no better testimony.

The lesson was not yet clear in the 18th century, as America was to learn to her cost in our own century, that the presence of disunity in the military about method and strategy, and among the nation's people about the rightness of the war aim, makes it impossible for a war of any duration to be fought effectively and won.

One English nobleman and statesman read and reread a particular work of literature because it was "the only book which allowed him to forget politics.

Moltke closed upon that rigid phrase, the basis for every major German mistake, the phrase that launched the invasion of Belgium and the submarine war against the United States, the inevitable phrase when military plans dictate policy—"and once settled it cannot be altered.

Palaver is the rule," he said. "Every morning I lose three hours in reports and discussions which have no results. Every decision requires an arbitration. Even as Chief of Staff to the Governor, I cannot, as a simple general of brigade, give orders to the generals of division who command the sectors.

Present-day anthropologists defend the thesis that the American Indians were in fact originally Mongolians who crossed over by the Bering Strait.)

The art of oratory was considered part of the equipment of a statesman.

The castle's predecessor, the Roman villa, had been unfortified, depending on Roman law and the Roman legions for its ramparts. After the Empire's collapse, the medieval society that emerged was a set of disjointed and clashing parts subject to no central or effective secular authority.

the French, who had put large expectations in the abasement of Britain that American success would cause, had been disappointed by the weakness of the American military effort. Instead of an aggressive ally, they were tied to a dependent client, unable to establish a strong government and requiring transfusions of men-at-arms and money to keep its war effort alive.

Moltke was aghast. This was the result of leaving that fat idiot in command of the Eighth Army, and of his own ill-considered last words to him.

slaughter. And yet, so great is Mrs. Tuchman's skill that the reader forgets what he knows. Surrounded by the thunder of guns, the thrust and parry of bayonet and saber, he becomes almost a participant. Will the exhausted Germans keep coming? Can the desperate French and British hold? Will Paris fall? Mrs. Tuchman's

Clement VI to shorten the interval to fifty years. The Pope of the joyous murals operated on the amiable principle that "a pontiff should make his subjects happy." He complied with Rome's request in a Bull of 1343. Momentously for the Church, Clement formulated in the same Bull the theory of indulgences, and fixed its fatal equation with money.

The author says one patrician English leader saw his relationship with the populace thusly: He wasn't responsible TO them. He was responsible FOR them. He was responsible for their care.

Treitschke who set the increase of power as the highest moral duty of the state, of the whole German people, who called their temporal ruler the "All-Highest.

Belgium's declared intention to fight was, the Germans believed, no more than the "rage of dreaming sheep"—in the words a Prussian statesman once applied to his domestic opponents.

He believed that rank without power was a sham.

The claim of the Church to spiritual leadership could never be made wholly credible to all its communicants when it was founded in material wealth. The more riches the Church amassed, the more visible and disturbing became the flaw; nor could it ever be resolved, but continued to renew doubt and dissent in every century.

Complacency is an attribute of long-retained power like that of the Chinese.