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

Barbara Tuchman

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Barbara Tuchman
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More quotes by Barbara Tuchman

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To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.
Barbara Tuchman
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Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
Barbara Tuchman
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Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
Barbara Tuchman
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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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In a country where misery and want were the foundation of the social structure, famine was periodic, death from starvation common, disease pervasive, thievery normal, and graft and corruption taken for granted, the elimination of these conditions in Communist China is so striking that negative aspects of the new rule fade in relative importance.
Barbara Tuchman
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If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements,corrupts even more.
Barbara Tuchman
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Governments do not like to face radical remedies it is easier to let politics predominate.
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.
Barbara Tuchman
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Friendship of a kind that cannot easily be reversed tomorrow must have its roots in common interests and shared beliefs.
Barbara Tuchman
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Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
Barbara Tuchman
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Government remains the paramount area of folly because it is there that men seek power over others - only to lose it over themselves.
Barbara Tuchman
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The ills and disorders of the 14th century could not be without consequence. Times were to grow worse over the next fifty-odd years until at some imperceptible moment, by the some mysterious chemistry, energies were refreshed, ideas broke out of the mold of the Middle Ages into new realms, and humanity found itself redirected.
Barbara Tuchman
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While husbands and lovers in the stories are of all kinds, ranging from sympathetic to disgusting, women are invariably deceivers: inconstant, unscrupulous, quarrelsome, querulous, lecherous, shameless, although not necessarily all of these at once.
Barbara Tuchman
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In America, where the electoral process is drowning in commercial techniques of fund-raising and image-making, we may have completed a circle back to a selection process as unconcerned with qualifications as that which made Darius King of Persia. ... he whose horse was the first to neigh at sunrise should be King.
Barbara Tuchman
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Modern historians have suggested that in his last years he (Richard II) was overtaken by mental disease, but that is only a modern view of the malfunction common to 14th century rulers: inability to inhibit impulse.
Barbara Tuchman
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The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
Barbara Tuchman
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To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
Barbara Tuchman
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Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government, and when combined with a position of power even more so.
Barbara Tuchman
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Belgium, where there occurred one of the rare appearances of the hero in history, was lifted above herself by the uncomplicated conscience of her King and, faced with the choice to acquiesce or resist, took less than three hours to make her decision, knowing it might be mortal.
Barbara Tuchman