Barbara W. Tuchman Quotes
In writing I am seduced by the sound of words and by the interaction of their sound and sense.
Between the happening of a historical process and its recognition by rulers, a lag stretches, full of pitfalls.
He was always acting, always enveloping himself in artificiality, perhaps to conceal the volcano within.
The utility of perseverance in absurdity is more than I could ever discern. Edmund Burke
Confronted by menace or what is perceived as menace, governments will usually attempt to smash it, rarely to examine it, understand it, and drefine it.
Britain had an air of careless supremacy which GALLED her neighbors.
Duty was not untinged by ambition.
A minister's (cabinet member's) function was not to DO the work but to see that it got done.
The author says one patrician English leader saw his relationship with the populace thusly: He wasn't responsible TO them. He was responsible FOR them. He was responsible for their care.
Even his own speeches bored him.
Diplomacy's primary law: LEAVE ROOM FOR NEGOTIATION.
What other country has had the privilege of making the world's heart beat faster?
House speaker Thomas read could see the trend, but he could not have changed himself.
William McKinley was a man made to be managed.
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.
Government was rarely more than a choice between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as "the most flagrant of all passions.
Now according to German logic, a declaration of war was found to be unnecessary because of imaginary bombings
Books are ... companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of mind. Books are humanity in print.
Everything interested him and everything excited him.
All this visible greatness was really one with Nineveh and Tyre.
A reformer exhorted children that they would succeed where he and his colleagues had failed with the charge: "Live for that better day.
No one is is sure of his premise as the man who knows too little.
Humanizing war?! You may as well talk of humanizing Hell. Sir John Fisher
The overpowering unimportance of this MAKES ME SPEECHLESS. – Speaker of the House of Representatives Thomas Reed
Everything took on the color of blood.
Even the respectable have a small anarchist hidden on the inside.
Irritability was an occupational disease. Intolerant and intolerable belong in the same category.
Why, since folly or perversity is expected of individuals, should we expect anything else from government?
Disorder is the least tolerable up sinful conditions.
Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government.
When meeting criticism, he would regard it not as something to resent but as a thing to be examined, like an interesting beetle. "That's a curious view, not uninteresting.
The tribal pull of patriotism could have no better testimony.
Asked what would be his idea of Heaven, one statesman in 1897 said it would be to "receive a flow of telegrams alternating news of a British victory by sea and a British victory by land.
Malignant phenomena do not come out of a golden age.
The scene is France. The theater is the world.
Prison does not silence ideas whose time has come.
No single characteristic ever overtakes an entire society.
How much does a man's effort depend upon the age in which his work is cast? Pope Clement VII
If it was bliss to be alive, to hunt was rapture.
Isolation might be more hazardous than splendor.
He had been present in their minds not as a man but as an idea.