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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.

Barbara Tuchman

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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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Human behavior is timeless.
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To gain victory over the flesh was the purpose of fasting and celibacy, which denied the pleasures of this world for the sake of reward in the next.
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To be right and overruled is not forgiven to persons in responsible positions.
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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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Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence. It is no fun to write lumpishly, dully, in prose the reader must plod through like wet sand. But it is a pleasure to achieve, if one can, a clear running prose that is simple yet full of surprises. This does not just happen. It requires skill, hard work, a good ear, and continued practice.
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Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
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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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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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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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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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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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Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.
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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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Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
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If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.
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To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
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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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Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
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