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Friendship of a kind that cannot easily be reversed tomorrow must have its roots in common interests and shared beliefs.

Barbara Tuchman

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Barbara Tuchman
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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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To be right and overruled is not forgiven to persons in responsible positions.
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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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Human behavior is timeless.
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To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
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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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If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.
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Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced
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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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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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Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
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Russians, in the knowledge of inexhaustible supplies of manpower, are accustomed to accepting gigantic fatalities with comparative calm.
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To put away one's own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.
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When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.
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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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The writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention.
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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 sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
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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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