Barbara Tuchman

Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.

Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.

What is government but an arrangement by which the many accept the authority of the few

War is the unfolding of miscalculations.

No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.

To put away one's own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.

Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard.

Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.

Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place.

Honor wears different coats to different eyes.

An essential element for good writing is a good ear: One must listen to the sound of one's own prose.

For me, the card catalog has been a companion all my working life. To leave it is like leaving the house one was brought up in.

HONOR WEARS DIFFERENT COATS TO DIFFERENT EYES.

Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip.

To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.

Books are humanity in print.

Diplomacy means all the wicked devices of the Old World, spheres of influence, balances of power, secret treaties, triple alliances, and, during the interim period, appeasement of Fascism.

The better part of valor is to spend it learning to live with differences, however hostile, unless and until we can find another planet.

The fleet sailed to its war base in the North Sea, headed not so much for some rendezvous with glory as for rendezvous with discretion.

More than a code of manners in war and love Chivalry was a moral system governing the whole of noble life.