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The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.

Barbara Tuchman

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Barbara Tuchman
Always
Irrepressible
Humankind
Appetite
Destructive
Almost
Action
Power

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The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
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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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The writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention.
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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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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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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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Russians, in the knowledge of inexhaustible supplies of manpower, are accustomed to accepting gigantic fatalities with comparative calm.
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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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Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
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Completeness is rare in history.
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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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Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
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If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.
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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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That the Jews were unholy was a belief so ingrained by the Church [by the 14th century] that the most devout persons were the harshest in their antipathy, none more so than St. Louis.
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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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Woman was the Church's rival, the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the Devil's decoy.
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To be right and overruled is not forgiven to persons in responsible positions.
Barbara Tuchman
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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 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.
Barbara Tuchman