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To put away one's own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.

Barbara Tuchman

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Barbara Tuchman
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More quotes by Barbara Tuchman

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The fleet sailed to its war base in the North Sea, headed not so much for some rendezvous with glory as for rendezvous with discretion.
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When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.
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More than a code of manners in war and love, Chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life.
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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.
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If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.
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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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If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.
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bureaucracy, safely repeating today what it did yesterday, rolls on as ineluctably as some vast computer, which, once penetrated by error, duplicates it forever.
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Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced
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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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Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
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Russians, in the knowledge of inexhaustible supplies of manpower, are accustomed to accepting gigantic fatalities with comparative calm.
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satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
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Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
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Above all, discard the irrelevant.
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Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
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I ask myself, have nations ever declined from a loss of moral sense rather than from physical reasons or the pressure of barbarians? I think that they have.
Barbara Tuchman
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In April 1917 the illusion of isolation was destroyed, America came to the end of innocence, and of the exuberant freedom of bachelor independence. That the responsibilities of world power have not made us happier is no surprise. To help ourselves manage them, we have replaced the illusion of isolation with a new illusion of omnipotence.
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The writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention.
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