Quotes from Barbara W. Tuchman

One Cardinal entered his cathedral for the first time at his funeral.

had said, "The greatest contribution Vietnam is making … is developing an ability in the United States to fight a limited war, to go to war without arousing the public ire.

The last French Bourbon to reign, Charles X, brother of the guillotined Louis XVI and of his brief successor, Louis XVIII, displayed a recurring type of folly best described as the Humpty-Dumpty type: that is to say, the effort to reinstate a fallen and shattered structure, turning back history. In the process, called reaction or counter-revolution, the reactionary right is bent on restoring the privileges and property of the old regime and somehow retrieving a strength it did not have before.

Hubert Humphrey advised new members, "If you feel an urge to stand up and make a speech attacking Vietnamese policy, don't make it.

The Germans were obsessively concerned about violations of international law. They succeeded in overlooking the violation created by their presence in Belgium in favor of the violation committed, as they saw it, by Belgians resisting their presence.

The affair made men feel larger than life.

passion for Sybil, wife of a lord of Lorraine, Enguerrand

servile degree." The object of the noble's function, in theory, was not fighting for fighting's sake, but defense of the two other estates and the maintenance of justice and order. He was supposed to protect the people from oppression, to combat tyranny, and to cultivate virtue—that is, the higher qualities of humanity of which the mud-stained ignorant peasant was considered incapable by his contemporaries in Christianity, if not by its founder.

But to "settle" the Eastern Question was beyond even Disraeli's power—beyond, it seems, any human power, for it still haunts the world today.

He had been present in their minds not as a man but as an idea.

Concentration of wealth was moving upward in the 14th century and enlarging the proportion of the poor, while the catastrophes of the century reduced large numbers to misery and want. The poor had remained manageable as long as their minimum subsistence could be maintained by charity, but the situation changed when urban populations were swelled by the flotsam of war and plague and infused by a new aggressiveness in the plague's wake.

Depression and despair accompanied the physical symptoms, and before the end "death is seen seated on the face.

Europe was a heap of swords piled as delicately as jackstraws; one could not be pulled out without moving the others. Under

He said that whatever the outcome in America, he would always regard it as a glory and honor to have upheld the cause which he regarded as that of all humankind.

the Archimedean point where the lever can be applied." At

His one essay in love had exhausted his powers in that direction.

His successors Benedict XII and Clement VI built in stages the great papal palace at Avignon on a rock overlooking the Rhône, a huge and inharmonious mass of roofs and towers without coherent design.

Everything one has a right to do is not best to be done.

When meeting criticism, he would regard it not as something to resent but as a thing to be examined, like an interesting beetle. "That's a curious view, not uninteresting.

When he smelled battle afar off, Winston Churchill resembled the war horse in Job who turned not back from the sword, but 'paweth in the valley and saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha.' He was the only British minister to have a perfectly clear conviction of what Britain should do and to act upon it without hesitation.

It has been said that if the protagonists of Hamlet and Othello were reversed, there would have been no tragedy: Hamlet would have seen through Iago in no time and Othello would not have hesitated to kill King Claudius.

The greatness of the object enabled my mind to support what my strengths of body was scarce equal to.

Britain had an air of careless supremacy which GALLED her neighbors.

If he had a little more brains he would be a half-wit.