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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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Barbara Tuchman
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If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.
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Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
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Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
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The story and study of the past, both recent and distant, will not reveal the future, but it flashes beacon lights along the way and it is a useful nostrum against despair.
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Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
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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.
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One must stop conducting research before one has finished. Otherwise, one will never stop and never finish.
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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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The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
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Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
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To be right and overruled is not forgiven to persons in responsible positions.
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Friendship of a kind that cannot easily be reversed tomorrow must have its roots in common interests and shared beliefs.
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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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satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
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If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.
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Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts.
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Above all, discard the irrelevant.
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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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Of all the ills that our poor ... society is heir to, the focal one, it seems to me, from which so much of our uneasiness and confusion derive, is the absence of standards.
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Russians, in the knowledge of inexhaustible supplies of manpower, are accustomed to accepting gigantic fatalities with comparative calm.
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