Barbara Tuchman Quotes

Who asks whether the enemy was defeated by strategy or valor?

I have my cousin's jacket from when he was at war in Iraq. He never came home. It's incredible to have something that is so personal but that I also feel relatively comfortable wearing.

I'm interested in wartime stories, as I think it's important to remember what the soldiers went through.

I served two tours of duty in Vietnam. I won the Bronze Star. I won the Purple Heart.

War is an arena for the display of courage and virtue. Or war is politics by other means. War is a quasi-mystical experience where you get in touch with the real. There are millions of narratives we impose to try to make sense of war.

Man is a military animal, glories in gunpowder, and loves parade.

As we have sought through the centuries to define ourselves as human beings and as nations through the prisms of history and literature, no small part of that effort has drawn us to the subject of war. We might even say that the humanities began with war and from war, and have remained entwined with it ever since.

The sense of war, the extraordinary bravery of the Allied armies, the numbers, the losses, the real suffering that disappears in time and commemorative oratory, are not marked out in any red guidebook of the emotions, but they are present if you look.

The entire deaths of Vietnam died in vain. And they're dying in vain right this very second. And you know what's worse than a soldier dying in vain? It's more soldiers dying in vain. That's what's worse.

I was only a gun captain on the battleship Alabama for 34 months. People have called me a hero for that, but I'll tell you this - heroes don't come home. Survivors come home.

There is no common sense in going to the field to fight and leaving a man at home to undo all that you accomplish.

I have seen lonely people of advancing age, yet as constant as angels, keeping faith to those they loved who fell in wars that current generations, not having known them, cannot even forget. The sight of them moving hesitantly among the tablets and crosses is enough to break your heart.

I wanted to write a battle song for the Judeans but so far I can think of nothing noble and weighty enough.

And the blood of brave men was shed like unto the shedding of rain from a black cloud.

Tell mother, tell mother, I died for my country... useless... useless.

1 month ago the American people stopped to remember the third anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war. We thought first and foremost of the selflessness, patriotism and heroism by our troops, our National Guard and Reserves.

I am the living death, a Memorial Day on wheels. I am your Yankee Doodle Dandy, your John Wayne come home, your Fourth of July firecracker exploding in the grave.

I think that you can honour the sacrifices of a common soldier without glorifying war.

Israel should not feel satisfaction at my son's death, for he died on the battlefield, facing the conquerors as he wished, with a gun in his hand.

I'm glad I never went to war.

The accounting of the sacrifice is, more than anything else, the attitude toward war memorials in our time.

War is America's central liturgical act necessary to renew our sense that we are a nation unlike other nations.

For all the failures of naval, air and army defense, the men who died at Pearl Harbor and in the Philippines would not die in vain.

Surviving is the only glory in war.

Great battles can make great heroes and heroines.