276 Quotes by Barbara W. Tuchman

The turn of events in Belgium was a product of the German theory of terror. Clausewitz had prescribed terror as the proper method to shorten war, his whole theory of war being based on the necessity of making it short, sharp, and decisive. The civil population must not be exempted from war’s effects but must be made to feel its pressure and be forced by the severest measures to compel their leaders to make peace.

The limitation prompting folly ” was an attitude of superiority so dense as to be impenetrable.

Revolutions produce other men, not new men. Halfway between truth and endless error, the mold of the species is permanent. That is Earth’s burden.

His only weakness was the habit of prophesying war within the next fortnight. George Bernard Shaw.

In many guilds artisans struck for higher pay and shorter hours. In an age when social conditions were regarded as fixed, such action was revolutionary.

Clausewitz, a dead Prussian, and Norman Angell, a living if misunderstood professor, had combined to fasten the short-war concept upon the European mind. Quick, decisive victory was the German orthodoxy;.

When Latimer demanded to know by whom and by what authority he was being indicted, Sir Peter de la Mare supplied the historic answer that the Commons as a body would maintain all their charges in common. At one stroke he created the constitutional means for impeachment and removal of ministers.

Guides were Franciscan monks, sole custodians of the holy places after 1230, who recited the history and traditions associated with each town or monument or site of Biblical events to parties of visitors as they arrived. More.

The daughter is the goddess, separately or together, of Infatuation, Mischief, Delusion and Blind Folly, rendering her victims “incapable of rational choice” and blind to distinctions of morality and expedience.