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

More quotes by 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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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.
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Human behavior is timeless.
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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.
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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.
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Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
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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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No female iniquity was more severely condemned than the habit of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten the forehead.
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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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Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
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Woman was the Church's rival, the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the Devil's decoy.
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Friendship of a kind that cannot easily be reversed tomorrow must have its roots in common interests and shared beliefs.
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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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In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.
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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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Governments do not like to face radical remedies it is easier to let politics predominate.
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Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
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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.
Barbara Tuchman
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Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
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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