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To be a bestseller is not necessarily a measure of quality, but it is a measure of communication.

Barbara Tuchman

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Barbara Tuchman
Necessarily
Communication
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More quotes by Barbara Tuchman

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Friendship of a kind that cannot easily be reversed tomorrow must have its roots in common interests and shared beliefs.
Barbara Tuchman
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The writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention.
Barbara Tuchman
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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.
Barbara Tuchman
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In April 1917 the illusion of isolation was destroyed, America came to the end of innocence, and of the exuberant freedom of bachelor independence. That the responsibilities of world power have not made us happier is no surprise. To help ourselves manage them, we have replaced the illusion of isolation with a new illusion of omnipotence.
Barbara Tuchman
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Governments do not like to face radical remedies it is easier to let politics predominate.
Barbara Tuchman
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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.
Barbara Tuchman
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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.
Barbara Tuchman
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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.
Barbara Tuchman
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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
Barbara Tuchman
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To be right and overruled is not forgiven to persons in responsible positions.
Barbara Tuchman
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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.
Barbara Tuchman
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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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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.
Barbara Tuchman
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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.
Barbara Tuchman
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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.
Barbara Tuchman
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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.
Barbara Tuchman
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The Hundred Years' War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity.
Barbara Tuchman
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Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
Barbara Tuchman
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The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.
Barbara Tuchman
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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.
Barbara Tuchman