Barbara Tuchman

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

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

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

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

Books are humanity in print.

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