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Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.

Barbara Tuchman

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Barbara Tuchman
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Especially
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Fateful
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Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
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Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced
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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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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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No nation in the world has so many drastic problems squeezed into so small a space, under such urgent pressure of time and heavy burden of history, as Israel.
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To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.
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Human behavior is timeless.
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satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
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In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.
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Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
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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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The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
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Woman was the Church's rival, the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the Devil's decoy.
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The Hundred Years' War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity.
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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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Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government, and when combined with a position of power even more so.
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Completeness is rare in history.
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Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
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I ask myself, have nations ever declined from a loss of moral sense rather than from physical reasons or the pressure of barbarians? I think that they have.
Barbara Tuchman
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Money was the crux. Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself.
Barbara Tuchman