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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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Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
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In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.
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The Hundred Years' War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity.
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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.
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Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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 They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.
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To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
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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.
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The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard
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Governments do not like to face radical remedies it is easier to let politics predominate.
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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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The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.
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Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
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Above all, discard the irrelevant.
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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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satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
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