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In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.

Barbara Tuchman

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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.
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Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts.
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One must stop conducting research before one has finished. Otherwise, one will never stop and never finish.
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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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The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
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Above all, discard the irrelevant.
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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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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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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 story and study of the past, both recent and distant, will not reveal the future, but it flashes beacon lights along the way and it is a useful nostrum against despair.
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To be right and overruled is not forgiven to persons in responsible positions.
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Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex.
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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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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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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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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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The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.
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