Quotes from Barbara W. Tuchman

Prison does not silence ideas whose time has come.

Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself.

Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government.

Although the defects of the Russian Army were notorious, although the Russian winter, not the Russian Army, had turned Napoleon back from Moscow, although it had been defeated on its own soil by the French and British in the Crimea, although the Turks in 1877 had outfought it at the siege of Plevna and only succumbed later to overwhelming numbers, although the Japanese had outfought it in Manchuria, a myth of its invincibility prevailed.

The French right wing, opening the offensive into German-occupied Lorraine, took an old embattled path like so many in France and Belgium where, century after century, whatever the power that makes men fight brought legions tramping down the same roads, leveling the same villages.

Even the respectable have a small anarchist hidden on the inside.

He never hears the truth about himself by not wishing to hear it." Pope Alexander

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

Fear of God is thrown away," lamented Brigitta in Rome, "and in its place is a bottomless bag of money." All the Ten Commandments, she said, had been reduced to one: "Bring hither the money.

To admit error and cut losses is rare among individuals, unknown among states. States function only in terms of what those in control perceive as power or personal ambition, and both of these wear blinkers.

So lethal was the disease that cases were known of persons going to bed well and dying before they woke, of doctors catching the illness at a bedside and dying before the patient.

Diplomacy's primary law: LEAVE ROOM FOR NEGOTIATION.

The wave of insurrection passed, leaving little change in the condition of the working class. Inertia in the scales of history weighs more heavily than change. Four hundred years were to elapse before the descendants of the Maillotins seized the Bastille.

SOME DAMNED FOOLISH THING in the Balkans," Bismarck had predicted, would ignite the next war. The assassination of the Austrian heir apparent, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, by Serbian nationalists on June 28, 1914, satisfied his condition.

Those deterrents—the brotherhood of socialists, the interlocking of finance, commerce, and other economic factors—which had been expected to make war impossible failed to function when the time came. Nationhood, like a wild gust of wind, arose and swept them aside. People

Women were considered the snare of the Devil, while at the same time the cult of the Virgin made one woman the central object of love and adoration.

Eyeglasses had been in use since the turn of the century, allowing old people to read more in their later years and greatly extending the scholar's life of study. The manufacture of paper as a cheaper and more plentiful material than parchment was beginning to make possible multiple copies and wider distribution of literary works.

the Pope replied, "What can you preach to the people? If on humility, you yourselves are the proudest of the world, puffed up, pompous and sumptuous in luxuries. If on poverty, you are so covetous that all the benefices in the world are not enough for you. If on chastity—but we will be silent on this, for God knoweth what each man does and how many of you satisfy your lusts.

Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.

The follies that produced the loss of American virtue following Vietnam begin with continuous overreacting, in the invention of endangered national security, the invention of vital interest, the invention of a commitment which rapidly assumed a life of its own .

They were twelve days in which world history wavered between two courses and the Germans came so close to victory that they reached out and touched it between the Aisne and the Marne.

Revolutions produce other men, not new men. Halfway between truth and endless error, the mold of the species is permanent. That is Earth's burden.

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 creating a climate for pessimism, the Black Death was the equivalent of the First World War, although it took fifty years for the psychological effects to develop.

It was a "severe" disappointment to Henry Wilson who laid it all at the door of Kitchener and the Cabinet for having sent only four divisions instead of six. Had all six been present, he said with that marvelous incapacity to admit error that was to make him ultimately a Field Marshal, "this retreat would have been an advance and defeat would have been a victory.