276 Quotes by Barbara W. Tuchman

Without a country, you are the basket of humanity.

Henry Adams, like most people, saw society in his own image.

He had been present in their minds not as a man but as an idea.

Extravagant sartorial display had a purpose. It created the impression of wealth and power on the opponent and pride in the wearer which has been lost sight of in our nervously egalitarian times.

Nations, like people, are often more pragmatic than they know or can explain.

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

Britain had an air of careless supremacy which GALLED her neighbors.

Command, deprived of personal judgment, can win no battles.

The early removal from school of future officers of Britain's seapower, leaving them unacquainted with the subject matter and ideas of the distant and recent past, may account for the incapacity of no military thinking in a world that devoted itself to military action. With little thought of strategy, no study of the theory of war or of planned objective, war's glorious art may have been glorious, but with individual exceptions, it was more or less mindless.