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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.

Barbara Tuchman

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Barbara Tuchman
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Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.
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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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While husbands and lovers in the stories are of all kinds, ranging from sympathetic to disgusting, women are invariably deceivers: inconstant, unscrupulous, quarrelsome, querulous, lecherous, shameless, although not necessarily all of these at once.
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In a country where misery and want were the foundation of the social structure, famine was periodic, death from starvation common, disease pervasive, thievery normal, and graft and corruption taken for granted, the elimination of these conditions in Communist China is so striking that negative aspects of the new rule fade in relative importance.
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Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced
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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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Human behavior is timeless.
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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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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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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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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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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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One constant among the elements of 1914—as of any era—was the disposition of everyone on all sides not to prepare for the harder alternative, not to act upon what they suspected to be true.
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Completeness is rare in history.
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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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The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.
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Governments do not like to face radical remedies it is easier to let politics predominate.
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The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
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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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