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Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.

Barbara Tuchman

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Barbara Tuchman
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More quotes by Barbara Tuchman

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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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Human behavior is timeless.
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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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Russians, in the knowledge of inexhaustible supplies of manpower, are accustomed to accepting gigantic fatalities with comparative calm.
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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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If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.
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To be right and overruled is not forgiven to persons in responsible positions.
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No female iniquity was more severely condemned than the habit of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten the forehead.
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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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If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.
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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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Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
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Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced
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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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In a country where misery and want were the foundation of the social structure, famine was periodic, death from starvation common, disease pervasive, thievery normal, and graft and corruption taken for granted, the elimination of these conditions in Communist China is so striking that negative aspects of the new rule fade in relative importance.
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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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When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.
Barbara Tuchman
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No economic activity was more irrepressible [in the 14th century] than the investment and lending at interest of money it was the basis for the rise of the Western capitalist economy and the building of private fortunes-and it was based on the sin of usury.
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The writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention.
Barbara Tuchman
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The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
Barbara Tuchman