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Woman was the Church's rival, the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the Devil's decoy.

Barbara Tuchman

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Barbara Tuchman
Devil
Decoy
Century
Temptress
Church
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Woman
Obstacle
Women
Rivals
Distraction
Holiness
Obstacles

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Books are humanity in print.
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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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Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex.
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No economic activity was more irrepressible [in the 14th century] than the investment and lending at interest of money it was the basis for the rise of the Western capitalist economy and the building of private fortunes-and it was based on the sin of usury.
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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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The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard
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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 America, where the electoral process is drowning in commercial techniques of fund-raising and image-making, we may have completed a circle back to a selection process as unconcerned with qualifications as that which made Darius King of Persia. ... he whose horse was the first to neigh at sunrise should be King.
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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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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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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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