Barbara W. Tuchman

“If the historian will submit himself to his material instead of trying to impose himself on his material, then the material will ultimately speak to him and supply the answers.”

“Let us retreat when we can, not when we must. Lord Chatham”

“After the war, when my husband came home, we had two more children, and domesticity for a while prevailed combined with beginning the work I had always wanted to do, which was writing a book.”

“Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex.”

“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.”

“Duty was not untinged by ambition.”

“Irritability was an occupational disease. Intolerant and intolerable belong in the same category.”

“He was always acting, always enveloping himself in artificiality, perhaps to conceal the volcano within.”

“The writer of history, I believe, has a number of duties vis-à-vis the reader, if he wants to keep him reading. The first is to distill. He must do the preliminary work for the reader, assemble the information, make sense of it, select the essential, discard the irrelevant- above all, discard the irrelevant - and put the rest together so that it forms a developing dramatic narrative. Narrative, it has been said , is the lifeblood of history. To offer a mass of undigested facts, of names not identified and places not located, is of no use to the reader and is simple laziness on the part of the author, or pedantry to show how much he has read.”

“In writing I am seduced by the sound of words and by the interaction of their sound and sense.”

“Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.”

“Folly is a child of power.”

“Policy was not reconsidered because the governing group had no habit of purposeful consultation.”

“Diplomacy means all the wicked devices of the Old World, spheres of influence, balances of power, secret treaties, triple alliances, and, during the interim period, appeasement of Fascism.”

“If they are afraid of revision in the laboratory, truth will never be released except by accident.”

“Our misconception in viewing the past lies in assuming that doubt and fear, permit, protests, violence and hate were not equally present.”

“Now according to German logic, a declaration of war was found to be unnecessary because of imaginary bombings”

“One English nobleman and statesman read and reread a particular work of literature because it was "the only book which allowed him to forget politics.”

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

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