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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
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Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
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The writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention.
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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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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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To be a bestseller is not necessarily a measure of quality, but it is a measure of communication.
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The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.
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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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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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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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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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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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In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.
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The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
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When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.
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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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Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
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