276 Quotes by Barbara W. Tuchman

Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as "the most flagrant of all passions.

Malignant phenomena do not come out of a golden age.

In proportion that property is small, the danger of misusing the franchisee is great.

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

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.

Chronicling future appeasing Prime Minister Joseph Chamberlain's rise to Parliament from first-generation commercial interests rather than the aristocracy, the author diagnoses even then that he had no center outside himself.

Enormity of the stakes became the new self-hypnosis.

He had the ruthlessness of uninterrupted success.

Government was rarely more than a choice between the disastrous and the unpalatable.