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Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.

Barbara Tuchman

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Barbara Tuchman
Fateful
Evoke
Grandeur
French
Tend
Speech
Especially
Moments

More quotes by 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.
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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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Government remains the paramount area of folly because it is there that men seek power over others - only to lose it over themselves.
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Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced
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When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.
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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.
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The writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention.
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Books are humanity in print.
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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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Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
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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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If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.
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That the Jews were unholy was a belief so ingrained by the Church [by the 14th century] that the most devout persons were the harshest in their antipathy, none more so than St. Louis.
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Friendship of a kind that cannot easily be reversed tomorrow must have its roots in common interests and shared beliefs.
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To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.
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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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satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
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Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
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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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