Awful momentum makes carrying through easier than calling off folly.

— Barbara W. Tuchman

Between the happening of a historical process and its recognition by rulers, a lag stretches, full of pitfalls.

— Barbara W. Tuchman

Books are ... companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of mind. Books are humanity in print.

— Barbara W. Tuchman

Books are humanity in print.

— Barbara W. Tuchman

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

— Barbara W. Tuchman

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in

— Barbara W. Tuchman

Britain had an air of careless supremacy which GALLED her neighbors.

— Barbara W. Tuchman

Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as "the most flagrant of all passions.

— Barbara W. Tuchman

Chronicling future appeasing Prime Minister Joseph Chamberlain's rise to Parliament from first-generation commercial interests rather than the aristocracy, the author diagnoses even then that he had no center outside himself.

— Barbara W. Tuchman

Civilians who volunteer generally wish to escape, not to share, privatizations worse than their own.

— Barbara W. Tuchman