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If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.

Barbara Tuchman

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Barbara Tuchman
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To be right and overruled is not forgiven to persons in responsible positions.
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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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To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
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Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
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The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
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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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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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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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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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Governments do not like to face radical remedies it is easier to let politics predominate.
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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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When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.
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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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Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
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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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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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Books are humanity in print.
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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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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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To be a bestseller is not necessarily a measure of quality, but it is a measure of communication.
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