276 Quotes by Barbara W. Tuchman

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

The affair made men feel larger than life.

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

Preconceived, fixed notions can be more damaging than cannon.

Little attention was paid, because the German people, no matter how hungry, remained obedient.

Belgium, where there occurred one of the rare appearances of the hero in history, was lifted above herself by the uncomplicated conscience of her King and, faced with the choice to acquiesce or resist, took less than three hours to make her decision, knowing it might be mortal.

To plunge into passionate dispute over the trivialities of so-called honor is a queerer but not uncommon gambit of men who have just come from putting their lives at stake in serious combat,

No one dared tell the outcome of the battle to Philip VI until his jester was thrust forward and said, "Oh, the cowardly English, the cowardly English!" and on being asked why, replied, "They did not jump overboard like our brave Frenchmen." The King evidently got the point. The fish drank so much French blood, it was said afterward, that if God had given them the power of speech they would have spoken in French.

Books are carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. They are engines of change, windows of the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time.