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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.

Barbara Tuchman

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Barbara Tuchman
Sea
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Discretion
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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.
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Of all the ills that our poor ... society is heir to, the focal one, it seems to me, from which so much of our uneasiness and confusion derive, is the absence of standards.
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Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
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Completeness is rare in history.
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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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Above all, discard the irrelevant.
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The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.
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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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Government remains the paramount area of folly because it is there that men seek power over others - only to lose it over themselves.
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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.
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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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Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
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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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Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced
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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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Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
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