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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
Rival
Woman
Obstacle
Women
Rivals
Distraction
Holiness
Obstacles

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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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The Hundred Years' War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity.
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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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One must stop conducting research before one has finished. Otherwise, one will never stop and never finish.
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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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Human behavior is timeless.
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Of all the ills that our poor ... society is heir to, the focal one, it seems to me, from which so much of our uneasiness and confusion derive, is the absence of standards.
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Above all, discard the irrelevant.
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If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.
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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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Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
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Governments do not like to face radical remedies it is easier to let politics predominate.
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In April 1917 the illusion of isolation was destroyed, America came to the end of innocence, and of the exuberant freedom of bachelor independence. That the responsibilities of world power have not made us happier is no surprise. To help ourselves manage them, we have replaced the illusion of isolation with a new illusion of omnipotence.
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While husbands and lovers in the stories are of all kinds, ranging from sympathetic to disgusting, women are invariably deceivers: inconstant, unscrupulous, quarrelsome, querulous, lecherous, shameless, although not necessarily all of these at once.
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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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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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The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.
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More than a code of manners in war and love, Chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life.
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