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The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.

Barbara Tuchman

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Barbara Tuchman
Myth
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Costliest
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Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
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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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To be right and overruled is not forgiven to persons in responsible positions.
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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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Above all, discard the irrelevant.
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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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The Hundred Years' War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity.
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Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced
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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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Government remains the paramount area of folly because it is there that men seek power over others - only to lose it over themselves.
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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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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 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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Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
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Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.
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Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
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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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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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Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
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The ills and disorders of the 14th century could not be without consequence. Times were to grow worse over the next fifty-odd years until at some imperceptible moment, by the some mysterious chemistry, energies were refreshed, ideas broke out of the mold of the Middle Ages into new realms, and humanity found itself redirected.
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