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No female iniquity was more severely condemned than the habit of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten the forehead.

Barbara Tuchman

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Barbara Tuchman
Century
Wrongdoing
Severely
Forehead
Foreheads
Condemned
Hairline
Eyebrows
Plucking
Female
Heighten
Habit
Iniquity

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To be right and overruled is not forgiven to persons in responsible positions.
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Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
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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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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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Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
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Books are humanity in print.
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Completeness is rare in history.
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Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced
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The nastiness of women [in the 14th century] was generally perceived at the close of life when a man began to worry about hell, and his sexual desire in any case fading.
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To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.
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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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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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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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When every autumn people said it could not last through the winter, and when every spring there was still no end in sight, only the hope that out of it all some good would accrue to mankind kept men and nations fighting. When at last it was over, the war had many diverse results and one dominant one transcending all others: disillusion.
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If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.
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Governments do not like to face radical remedies it is easier to let politics predominate.
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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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In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.
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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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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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