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To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.

Barbara Tuchman

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Barbara Tuchman
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More quotes by Barbara Tuchman

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If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements,corrupts even more.
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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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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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The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.
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Completeness is rare in history.
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The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
Barbara Tuchman
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No nation in the world has so many drastic problems squeezed into so small a space, under such urgent pressure of time and heavy burden of history, as Israel.
Barbara Tuchman
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In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.
Barbara Tuchman
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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.
Barbara Tuchman
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Woman was the Church's rival, the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the Devil's decoy.
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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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One must stop conducting research before one has finished. Otherwise, one will never stop and never finish.
Barbara Tuchman
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To be right and overruled is not forgiven to persons in responsible positions.
Barbara Tuchman
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Human behavior is timeless.
Barbara Tuchman
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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.
Barbara Tuchman
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That the Jews were unholy was a belief so ingrained by the Church [by the 14th century] that the most devout persons were the harshest in their antipathy, none more so than St. Louis.
Barbara Tuchman
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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.
Barbara Tuchman
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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.
Barbara Tuchman
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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.
Barbara Tuchman
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Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
Barbara Tuchman