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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
Relinquished
Retained
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Authority
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To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
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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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When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.
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Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced
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Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.
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Completeness is rare in history.
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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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Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
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satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
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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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The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.
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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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Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
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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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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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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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Modern historians have suggested that in his last years he (Richard II) was overtaken by mental disease, but that is only a modern view of the malfunction common to 14th century rulers: inability to inhibit impulse.
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The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
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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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Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
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