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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.
Barbara Tuchman
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More quotes by Barbara Tuchman
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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satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
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Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
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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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Books are humanity in print.
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Completeness is rare in history.
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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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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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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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If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.
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The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.
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Above all, discard the irrelevant.
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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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To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
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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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Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
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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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Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
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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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