Quotes from Barbara W. Tuchman

One constant among the elements of 1914—as of any era—was the disposition of everyone on all sides not to prepare for the harder alternative, not to act upon what they suspected to be true.

Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.

In a dependent relationship, the protégé can always control the protector by threatening to collapse.

Preconceived, fixed notions can be more damaging than cannon.

the seven "liberal arts": Grammar, the foundation of science; Logic, which differentiates the true from the false; Rhetoric, the source of law; Arithmetic, the foundation of order because "without numbers there is nothing"; Geometry, the science of measurement; Astronomy, the most noble of the sciences because it is connected with Divinity and Theology; and lastly Music.

When at last it was over, the war had many diverse results and one dominant one transcending all others: disillusion.

Once people envisioned the possibility of change in a fixed order, the end of an age of submission came in sight; the turn to individual conscience lay ahead. To that extent the Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man.

Little attention was paid, because the German people, no matter how hungry, remained obedient.

Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as "the most flagrant of all passions.

No one is is sure of his premise as the man who knows too little.

He wanted AFFIRMATION rather than INFORMATION.

The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold.

Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.

Pessimism is a primary source of passivity,

The process of gaining power employs means which degrade or brutalize the seeker, who awakes to find that power has been possessed at the cost of virtue or moral purpose lost.

Belgium, where there occurred one of the rare appearances of the hero in history, was lifted above herself by the uncomplicated conscience of her King and, faced with the choice to acquiesce or resist, took less than three hours to make her decision, knowing it might be mortal.

The textile industry was the automobile industry of the Middle Ages,

T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death.

No less a bold and pugnacious figure than Winston Churchill broke down and was unable to finish his remarks at the sendoff of the British Expeditionary Force into the maelstrom of World War I in Europe.

The Battle of the Marne was one of the decisive battles of the world not because it determined that Germany would ultimately lose or the Allies ultimately win the war but because it determined that the war would go on. There was no looking back, Joffre told the soldiers on the eve. Afterward there was no turning back. The nations were caught in a trap, a trap made during the first thirty days out of battles that failed to be decisive, a trap from which there was, and has been, no exit.

The impetus of existing plans is always stronger than the impulse to change.

Had all the world been a school and Wilson its principal, he would have been the greatest statesman in history.

The origin of war, according to its 14th century codifier Honoré Bonet, lay in Lucifer's war against God,

They resented the patronage they depended upon.