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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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To be a bestseller is not necessarily a measure of quality, but it is a measure of communication.
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If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.
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Woman was the Church's rival, the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the Devil's decoy.
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Historians who stuff in every item of research they have found, every shoelace and telephone call of a biographical subject, are not doing the hard work of selecting and shaping a readable story.
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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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Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
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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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To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
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Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence. It is no fun to write lumpishly, dully, in prose the reader must plod through like wet sand. But it is a pleasure to achieve, if one can, a clear running prose that is simple yet full of surprises. This does not just happen. It requires skill, hard work, a good ear, and continued practice.
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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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No nation in the world has so many drastic problems squeezed into so small a space, under such urgent pressure of time and heavy burden of history, as Israel.
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Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
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When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.
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To be right and overruled is not forgiven to persons in responsible positions.
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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 put away one's own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.
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Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
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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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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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If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements,corrupts even more.
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