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

Barbara Tuchman

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Barbara Tuchman
Food
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Libraries
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More quotes by Barbara Tuchman

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The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
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No female iniquity was more severely condemned than the habit of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten the forehead.
Barbara Tuchman
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To gain victory over the flesh was the purpose of fasting and celibacy, which denied the pleasures of this world for the sake of reward in the next.
Barbara Tuchman
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The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.
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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Above all, discard the irrelevant.
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 They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.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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That the Jews were unholy was a belief so ingrained by the Church [by the 14th century] that the most devout persons were the harshest in their antipathy, none more so than St. Louis.
Barbara Tuchman
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Human behavior is timeless.
Barbara Tuchman
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No economic activity was more irrepressible [in the 14th century] than the investment and lending at interest of money it was the basis for the rise of the Western capitalist economy and the building of private fortunes-and it was based on the sin of usury.
Barbara Tuchman
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Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
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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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
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Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex.
Barbara Tuchman
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Completeness is rare in history.
Barbara Tuchman
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When every autumn people said it could not last through the winter, and when every spring there was still no end in sight, only the hope that out of it all some good would accrue to mankind kept men and nations fighting. When at last it was over, the war had many diverse results and one dominant one transcending all others: disillusion.
Barbara Tuchman
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In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.
Barbara Tuchman
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The writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention.
Barbara Tuchman
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Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
Barbara Tuchman
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To be a bestseller is not necessarily a measure of quality, but it is a measure of communication.
Barbara Tuchman