The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history's clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.
Barbara TuchmanOne 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.
Barbara TuchmanVainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex.
Barbara TuchmanIt hurt the economic historians, the Marxists and the fabians, to admit that the Ten Hour Bill, the basic piece of 19th century legislation, came down from the top, out of aa nobleman's private feelings about the Gospel, or that the abolition of the slave trade was achieved, not through the operation of some "law" of profit and loss, but peurlet as the result of tyhe new humanitarianism of the Evangelicals.
Barbara Tuchman