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

Barbara Tuchman

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Barbara Tuchman
French
Tend
Speech
Especially
Moments
Fateful
Evoke
Grandeur

More quotes by 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.
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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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Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
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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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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.
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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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To be a bestseller is not necessarily a measure of quality, but it is a measure of communication.
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Belgium, where there occurred one of the rare appearances of the hero in history, was lifted above herself by the uncomplicated conscience of her King and, faced with the choice to acquiesce or resist, took less than three hours to make her decision, knowing it might be mortal.
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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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Governments do not like to face radical remedies it is easier to let politics predominate.
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I ask myself, have nations ever declined from a loss of moral sense rather than from physical reasons or the pressure of barbarians? I think that they have.
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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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One must stop conducting research before one has finished. Otherwise, one will never stop and never finish.
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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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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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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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If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.
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satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
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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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