Quotes from Barbara W. Tuchman

As they marched the Germans sang. They sang "Deutschland über Alles," "Die Wacht am Rhein," and "Heil dir im Siegeskranz." They sang when they halted, when they billeted, when they caroused. Many who lived through the next thirty days of mounting combat, agony, and terror were to remember the sound of endless, repetitious masculine singing as the worst torment of the invasion.

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

Humanizing war?! You may as well talk of humanizing Hell. Sir John Fisher

The danger in complacency is that it causes the possessor to ignore as unimportant the local factors and conditions that govern other people with whom it deals.

A minister's (cabinet member's) function was not to DO the work but to see that it got done.

These private wars were fought by the knights with furious gusto and a single strategy, which consisted in trying to ruin the enemy by killing or maiming as many of his peasants and destroying as many crops, vineyards, tools, barns, and other possessions as possible, thereby reducing his sources of revenue.

As a result, the chief victim of the belligerents was their respective peasantry.

Whatever our lot may be, August 4, 1914, will remain for all eternity one of Germany's greatest days!

The reckoning of time was based on the movements of sun and stars, nature's timekeepers, which were familar and carefully observed.

Each day he grew older and learned something new." Strong

Fate as a character in legend represents the fulfillment of man's expectations of himself.

Monocled and effete in appearance, cold and distant in manner, he concentrated with such single-mindedness on his profession that when an aide, at the end of an all-night staff ride in East Prussia, pointed out to him the beauty of the river Pregel sparkling in the rising sun, the General gave a brief, hard look and replied, "An unimportant obstacle.

The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.

What other country has had the privilege of making the world's heart beat faster?

executions were meant as an exercise in frightfulness according to the theory developed by the Emperor Caligula: "Oderint dum metuant" (Let them hate us as long as they fear us).

Regulations," he would say, "are all very well for drill but in the hour of danger they are no more use.… You have to learn to think." To think meant to give room for freedom of initiative, for the imponderable to win over the material, for will to demonstrate its power over circumstance.

One cannot quarrel with religious beliefs, especially of a strange, remote, half-understood culture. But when the beliefs become a delusion maintained against natural evidence to the point of losing the independence of a people, they may fairly be called folly.

Where Brooke was embracing cleanness and nobleness, Mann saw a more positive goal. Germans being, he said, the most educated, law-abiding, peace-loving of all peoples, deserved to be the most powerful, to dominate, to establish a "German peace" out of "what is being called with every possible justification the German war.

House speaker Thomas read could see the trend, but he could not have changed himself.

Although my initial question has escaped an answer, the interest of the period itself— a violent, tormented, bewildered, suffering and disintegrating age, a time, as many thought, of Satan triumphant— was compelling, as it seemed to me, consoling in a period of similar disarray. If our last decade or two of collapsing assumptions has been a period of unusual discomfort, it is reassuring to know that the human species has lived through worse before.

Though writing in 1917, Mann was reflecting 1914, the year that was to be the German 1789, the establishment of the German idea in history, the enthronement of Kultur, the fulfillment of Germany's historic mission. In August, sitting at a café in Aachen, a German scientist said to the American journalist Irwin Cobb: "We Germans are the most industrious, the most earnest, the best educated race in Europe.

Proper society did not think about MAKING money, only about spending it.

Bismarck has broken the nation's backbone," he wrote in 1886. "The injury done by the Bismarck era is infinitely greater than its benefits.… The subjugation of the German personality, of the German mind, was a misfortune that cannot be undone.

Major von Kleist gave orders that a man or, if no man was available, a woman, be taken from every household as a hostage." Through some peculiar failure of the system, the greater the terror, the more terror seemed to be necessary.