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

Barbara Tuchman

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Barbara Tuchman
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To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.
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Government remains the paramount area of folly because it is there that men seek power over others - only to lose it over themselves.
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Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
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Governments do not like to face radical remedies it is easier to let politics predominate.
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satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
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Historians who stuff in every item of research they have found, every shoelace and telephone call of a biographical subject, are not doing the hard work of selecting and shaping a readable story.
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Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.
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In America, where the electoral process is drowning in commercial techniques of fund-raising and image-making, we may have completed a circle back to a selection process as unconcerned with qualifications as that which made Darius King of Persia. ... he whose horse was the first to neigh at sunrise should be King.
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The writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention.
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More than a code of manners in war and love, Chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life.
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Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex.
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To be right and overruled is not forgiven to persons in responsible positions.
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When every autumn people said it could not last through the winter, and when every spring there was still no end in sight, only the hope that out of it all some good would accrue to mankind kept men and nations fighting. When at last it was over, the war had many diverse results and one dominant one transcending all others: disillusion.
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Books are humanity in print.
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The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
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The ills and disorders of the 14th century could not be without consequence. Times were to grow worse over the next fifty-odd years until at some imperceptible moment, by the some mysterious chemistry, energies were refreshed, ideas broke out of the mold of the Middle Ages into new realms, and humanity found itself redirected.
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One constant among the elements of 1914—as of any era—was the disposition of everyone on all sides not to prepare for the harder alternative, not to act upon what they suspected to be true.
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If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.
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Above all, discard the irrelevant.
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Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence. It is no fun to write lumpishly, dully, in prose the reader must plod through like wet sand. But it is a pleasure to achieve, if one can, a clear running prose that is simple yet full of surprises. This does not just happen. It requires skill, hard work, a good ear, and continued practice.
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