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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.
Barbara Tuchman
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Barbara Tuchman
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More quotes by Barbara Tuchman
To be a bestseller is not necessarily a measure of quality, but it is a measure of communication.
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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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Books are humanity in print.
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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.
Barbara Tuchman
The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.
Barbara Tuchman
In America, where the electoral process is drowning in commercial techniques of fund-raising and image-making, we may have completed a circle back to a selection process as unconcerned with qualifications as that which made Darius King of Persia. ... he whose horse was the first to neigh at sunrise should be King.
Barbara Tuchman
Human behavior is timeless.
Barbara Tuchman
To put away one's own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.
Barbara Tuchman
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.
Barbara Tuchman
The writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention.
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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.
Barbara Tuchman
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.
Barbara Tuchman
To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.
Barbara Tuchman
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.
Barbara Tuchman
Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
Barbara Tuchman
Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
Barbara Tuchman
When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.
Barbara Tuchman
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.
Barbara Tuchman
The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
Barbara Tuchman