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

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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.
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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.
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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.
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Governments do not like to face radical remedies it is easier to let politics predominate.
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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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One must stop conducting research before one has finished. Otherwise, one will never stop and never finish.
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Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
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The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.
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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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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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In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.
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Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
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The writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention.
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Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
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To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
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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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The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
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Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.
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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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If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.
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