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

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Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced
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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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More than a code of manners in war and love, Chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life.
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Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts.
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Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.
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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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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.
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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 fleet sailed to its war base in the North Sea, headed not so much for some rendezvous with glory as for rendezvous with discretion.
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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
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To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.
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The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
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Human behavior is timeless.
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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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To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
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Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
Barbara Tuchman
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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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Belgium, where there occurred one of the rare appearances of the hero in history, was lifted above herself by the uncomplicated conscience of her King and, faced with the choice to acquiesce or resist, took less than three hours to make her decision, knowing it might be mortal.
Barbara Tuchman
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If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements,corrupts even more.
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