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

More quotes by 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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Books are humanity in print.
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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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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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The story and study of the past, both recent and distant, will not reveal the future, but it flashes beacon lights along the way and it is a useful nostrum against despair.
Barbara Tuchman
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Human behavior is timeless.
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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No female iniquity was more severely condemned than the habit of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten the forehead.
Barbara Tuchman
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When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.
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The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
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Governments do not like to face radical remedies it is easier to let politics predominate.
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No economic activity was more irrepressible [in the 14th century] than the investment and lending at interest of money it was the basis for the rise of the Western capitalist economy and the building of private fortunes-and it was based on the sin of usury.
Barbara Tuchman
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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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satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
Barbara Tuchman
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Completeness is rare in history.
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If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.
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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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.
Barbara Tuchman
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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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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