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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
Time
Costliest
Monolith
Communist
Communism

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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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Governments do not like to face radical remedies it is easier to let politics predominate.
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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.
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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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Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.
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Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
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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 poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.
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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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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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Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
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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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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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bureaucracy, safely repeating today what it did yesterday, rolls on as ineluctably as some vast computer, which, once penetrated by error, duplicates it forever.
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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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If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.
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The nastiness of women [in the 14th century] was generally perceived at the close of life when a man began to worry about hell, and his sexual desire in any case fading.
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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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satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
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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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