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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
Monolith
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More quotes by Barbara Tuchman

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Modern historians have suggested that in his last years he (Richard II) was overtaken by mental disease, but that is only a modern view of the malfunction common to 14th century rulers: inability to inhibit impulse.
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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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If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.
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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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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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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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Books are humanity in print.
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Above all, discard the irrelevant.
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To be a bestseller is not necessarily a measure of quality, but it is a measure of communication.
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The writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention.
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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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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 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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To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.
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Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
Barbara Tuchman
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Completeness is rare in history.
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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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satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
Barbara Tuchman
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If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.
Barbara Tuchman
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In America, where the electoral process is drowning in commercial techniques of fund-raising and image-making, we may have completed a circle back to a selection process as unconcerned with qualifications as that which made Darius King of Persia. ... he whose horse was the first to neigh at sunrise should be King.
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