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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.

Barbara Tuchman

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Barbara Tuchman
Flesh
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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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If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.
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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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Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced
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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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No female iniquity was more severely condemned than the habit of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten the forehead.
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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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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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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.
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Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts.
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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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Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government, and when combined with a position of power even more so.
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Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
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The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
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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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Governments do not like to face radical remedies it is easier to let politics predominate.
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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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Human behavior is timeless.
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The fleet sailed to its war base in the North Sea, headed not so much for some rendezvous with glory as for rendezvous with discretion.
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