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Human behavior is timeless.

Barbara Tuchman

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Barbara Tuchman
Timeless
Behavior
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Humans

More quotes by Barbara Tuchman

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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.
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.
Barbara Tuchman
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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.
Barbara Tuchman
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satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
Barbara Tuchman
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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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Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
Barbara Tuchman
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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.
Barbara Tuchman
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No female iniquity was more severely condemned than the habit of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten the forehead.
Barbara Tuchman
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Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
Barbara Tuchman
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To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.
Barbara Tuchman
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In April 1917 the illusion of isolation was destroyed, America came to the end of innocence, and of the exuberant freedom of bachelor independence. That the responsibilities of world power have not made us happier is no surprise. To help ourselves manage them, we have replaced the illusion of isolation with a new illusion of omnipotence.
Barbara Tuchman
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The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
Barbara Tuchman
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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.
Barbara Tuchman
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The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.
Barbara Tuchman
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Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government, and when combined with a position of power even more so.
Barbara Tuchman
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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
Barbara Tuchman
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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.
Barbara Tuchman
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Completeness is rare in history.
Barbara Tuchman
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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.
Barbara Tuchman
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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.
Barbara Tuchman