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satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.

Barbara Tuchman

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Barbara Tuchman
Around
Wrapping
Exaggeration
Satire
Core
Reality

More quotes by Barbara Tuchman

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Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
Barbara Tuchman
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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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The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.
Barbara Tuchman
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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.
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 They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.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
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Russians, in the knowledge of inexhaustible supplies of manpower, are accustomed to accepting gigantic fatalities with comparative calm.
Barbara Tuchman
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No nation in the world has so many drastic problems squeezed into so small a space, under such urgent pressure of time and heavy burden of history, as Israel.
Barbara Tuchman
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Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced
Barbara Tuchman
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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.
Barbara Tuchman
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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.
Barbara Tuchman
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Woman was the Church's rival, the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the Devil's decoy.
Barbara Tuchman
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Human behavior is timeless.
Barbara Tuchman
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Governments do not like to face radical remedies it is easier to let politics predominate.
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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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.
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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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.
Barbara Tuchman
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Above all, discard the irrelevant.
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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The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.
Barbara Tuchman