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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
Every
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More quotes by 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.
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In a country where misery and want were the foundation of the social structure, famine was periodic, death from starvation common, disease pervasive, thievery normal, and graft and corruption taken for granted, the elimination of these conditions in Communist China is so striking that negative aspects of the new rule fade in relative importance.
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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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Friendship of a kind that cannot easily be reversed tomorrow must have its roots in common interests and shared beliefs.
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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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If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.
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The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
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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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The writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention.
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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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satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
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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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Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
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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.
Barbara Tuchman
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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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Governments do not like to face radical remedies it is easier to let politics predominate.
Barbara Tuchman
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To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
Barbara Tuchman
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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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Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced
Barbara Tuchman