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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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Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced
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Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
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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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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 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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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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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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Above all, discard the irrelevant.
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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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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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To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.
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Money was the crux. Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself.
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In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.
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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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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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To be a bestseller is not necessarily a measure of quality, but it is a measure of communication.
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Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
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