Quotes from Barbara W. Tuchman

Reporters, in the hope of eliciting a witticism, were always asking him for comments on the news of the day. They were not always successful. Asked to comment on a Papal message, he replied, "The overpowering unimportance of this makes me speechless." Asked what was the greatest problem confronting the American people, he replied, "How to dodge a bicycle.

Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.

The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.

Sternly saving his greatest strength for the right wing, he did not yield to that vaulting ambition in his plan. But the lure of the left wing remained to tempt his successors.

The Prime Minister was not the only person unconcerned with odds and ends of this kind. When a German official, foreseeing the change to a long war of attrition, presented Moltke with a memorandum on the need for an Economic General Staff, Moltke replied, "Don't bother me with economics—I am busy conducting a war.

Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip, and Germans, no less than other peoples, prepare for the last war.

Why, since folly or perversity is expected of individuals, should we expect anything else from government?

To Wilson neutrality was the opposite of isolationism. He wanted to keep out of war in order to play a larger, not a lesser, part in world affairs. He wanted the "great permanent glory" for himself as well as for his country, and he realized he could win it only if he kept America out of the quarrel so that he could act as impartial arbiter.

Connection" was the cement of the governing class.

Henry Lee's path-breaking resolution in Congress in June, 1776, "that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent

In any case, leaping trade with the Allies, which was taking up more than the slack of lost trade with Germany, dulled the edge of national principle. As long as goods were being absorbed, the United States came gradually to acquiesce in the process begun by the Order in Council of August 20.

Murray kept repeating that the BEF was under the formal orders of its Commander in Chief to rest, reorganize, and await reinforcements, and he could do nothing until his return.

Kitchener up to London, but could not yet nerve himself

Prison does not silence ideas whose time has come, a fact that generally escapes despots, who by nature are rulers of little wisdom.

Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on [office]," he wrote to a friend, "a rottenness begins in his conduct.

They governed from duty, heritage and habit—and, as they saw it, from right.

They gained the reputation of perfidi e scelleratissimi (perfidious and most wicked),

The Naval Minister next challenged the War Minister to a duel, but after fervent efforts by their colleagues to separate and calm the combatants, he embraced Messimy in tears and was persuaded to resign for reasons of health.

Lanrezac's sin was in having been right, all too vocally. He had been right from the beginning about the fatal underestimation of the German right wing as a result of which a fair part of France was now under the German boot. His decision to break off battle at Charleroi when threatened with double envelopment by Bülow's and Hausen's armies had saved the French left wing.

He believed interim reforms were necessary in order to fix the worker for his destiny.

prestige, and business, science and art not yet offering competing fields of endeavor, statecraft remained almost the only outlet for men of energy and purpose

For two centuries, the American arrangement has always managed to right itself under pressure without discarding the system and trying another after every crisis, as have Italy and Germany, France and Spain. Under accelerating incompetence in America, this may change.

Disorder is the least tolerable up sinful conditions.

Their credo was the exact opposite of the idea prevailing in the more newly minted United States, that there was a peculiar extra virtue in being lowly born, that only the self-made carried the badge of ability and that men of easy circumstances were more likely than not to be stupid or wicked, if not both.