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Above all, discard the irrelevant.

Barbara Tuchman

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Barbara Tuchman
Discard
Irrelevant

More quotes by Barbara Tuchman

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The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.
Barbara Tuchman
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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.
Barbara Tuchman
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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
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Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government, and when combined with a position of power even more so.
Barbara Tuchman
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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.
Barbara Tuchman
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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.
Barbara Tuchman
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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.
Barbara Tuchman
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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.
Barbara Tuchman
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Russians, in the knowledge of inexhaustible supplies of manpower, are accustomed to accepting gigantic fatalities with comparative calm.
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.
Barbara Tuchman
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In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.
Barbara Tuchman
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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.
Barbara Tuchman
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The Hundred Years' War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity.
Barbara Tuchman
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If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.
Barbara Tuchman
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The nastiness of women [in the 14th century] was generally perceived at the close of life when a man began to worry about hell, and his sexual desire in any case fading.
Barbara Tuchman
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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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Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
Barbara Tuchman
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Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
Barbara Tuchman
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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
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One must stop conducting research before one has finished. Otherwise, one will never stop and never finish.
Barbara Tuchman