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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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Books are humanity in print.
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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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No economic activity was more irrepressible [in the 14th century] than the investment and lending at interest of money it was the basis for the rise of the Western capitalist economy and the building of private fortunes-and it was based on the sin of usury.
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Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced
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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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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 They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.
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I ask myself, have nations ever declined from a loss of moral sense rather than from physical reasons or the pressure of barbarians? I think that they have.
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To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.
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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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Woman was the Church's rival, the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the Devil's decoy.
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Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
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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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Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
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To be right and overruled is not forgiven to persons in responsible positions.
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Above all, discard the irrelevant.
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To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
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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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The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
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Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
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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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