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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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Woman was the Church's rival, the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the Devil's decoy.
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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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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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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.
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Government remains the paramount area of folly because it is there that men seek power over others - only to lose it over themselves.
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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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Human behavior is timeless.
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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.
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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.
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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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The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.
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The story and study of the past, both recent and distant, will not reveal the future, but it flashes beacon lights along the way and it is a useful nostrum against despair.
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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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Completeness is rare in history.
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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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One must stop conducting research before one has finished. Otherwise, one will never stop and never finish.
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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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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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Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
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Governments do not like to face radical remedies it is easier to let politics predominate.
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