The overpowering unimportance of this MAKES ME SPEECHLESS. – Speaker of the House of Representatives Thomas Reed

— Barbara W. Tuchman

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.

— Barbara W. Tuchman

The scene is France. The theater is the world.

— Barbara W. Tuchman

These cumbersome vehicles were as convenient as if dinosaurs had survived to be used by cowboys for driving cattle

— Barbara W. Tuchman

The tribal pull of patriotism could have no better testimony.

— Barbara W. Tuchman

The utility of perseverance in absurdity is more than I could ever discern. Edmund Burke

— Barbara W. Tuchman

The writer of history, I believe, has a number of duties vis-à-vis the reader, if he wants to keep him reading. The first is to distill. He must do the preliminary work for the reader, assemble the information, make sense of it, select the essential, discard the irrelevant-above all, discard the irrelevant - and put the rest together so that it forms a developing dramatic narrative. Narrative, it has been said, is the lifeblood of history. To offer a mass of undigested facts, of names not identified and places not located, is of no use to the reader and is simple laziness on the part of the author, or pedantry to show how much he has read.

— Barbara W. Tuchman

They resented the patronage they depended upon.

— Barbara W. Tuchman

To those who think themselves strong, force always seems the easiest solution.

— Barbara W. Tuchman

Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex.

— Barbara W. Tuchman