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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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Barbara Tuchman
Errors
Penetrated
Yesterday
Duplicate
Computer
Rolls
Forever
Repeating
Today
Safely
Bureaucracy
Error
Vast
Duplicates

More quotes by 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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The nastiness of women [in the 14th century] was generally perceived at the close of life when a man began to worry about hell, and his sexual desire in any case fading.
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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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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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Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
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The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.
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Governments do not like to face radical remedies it is easier to let politics predominate.
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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 costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
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Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
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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 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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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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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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Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
Barbara Tuchman
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Human behavior is timeless.
Barbara Tuchman
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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.
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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The writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention.
Barbara Tuchman
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Woman was the Church's rival, the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the Devil's decoy.
Barbara Tuchman