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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

Barbara Tuchman

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Barbara Tuchman
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More quotes by Barbara Tuchman

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Governments do not like to face radical remedies it is easier to let politics predominate.
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To be a bestseller is not necessarily a measure of quality, but it is a measure of communication.
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The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.
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The story and study of the past, both recent and distant, will not reveal the future, but it flashes beacon lights along the way and it is a useful nostrum against despair.
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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.
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Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
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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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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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The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.
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Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
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To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
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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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To be right and overruled is not forgiven to persons in responsible positions.
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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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Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced
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One constant among the elements of 1914—as of any era—was the disposition of everyone on all sides not to prepare for the harder alternative, not to act upon what they suspected to be true.
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To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.
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When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.
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Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
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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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