Barbara W. Tuchman quotes:

No less a bold and pugnacious figure than Winston Churchill broke down and was unable to finish his remarks at the sendoff of the British Expeditionary Force into the maelstrom of World War I in Europe.

One Cardinal entered his cathedral for the first time at his funeral.

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.

If a man is a writer, everybody tiptoes around past the locked door of the breadwinner. But if you're an ordinary female housewife, people say, 'This is just something Barbara wanted to do; it's not professional.'

After the war, when my husband came home, we had two more children, and domesticity for a while prevailed combined with beginning the work I had always wanted to do, which was writing a book.

Enormity of the stakes became the new self-hypnosis.

In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.

No one is is sure of his premise as the man who knows too little.

Fate represents the fulfillment of man's expectations of himself.

When the children were very small, I worked in the morning only, and then gradually, as they spent full days at school, I could spend full days at work.

I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning until the end.

If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.

The fate of warnings in political affairs is to be futile when the recipient wishes otherwise.

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

He had the ruthlessness of uninterrupted success.

He wanted AFFIRMATION rather than INFORMATION.

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

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

The reality of a question is inevitably more complicated than we would like to suppose.