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One must stop conducting research before one has finished. Otherwise, one will never stop and never finish.

Barbara Tuchman

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Barbara Tuchman
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More quotes by 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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Human behavior is timeless.
Barbara Tuchman
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Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
Barbara Tuchman
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Completeness is rare in history.
Barbara Tuchman
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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.
Barbara Tuchman
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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.
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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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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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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Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced
Barbara Tuchman
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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.
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.
Barbara Tuchman
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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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To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
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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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 Hundred Years' War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity.
Barbara Tuchman
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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.
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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Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
Barbara Tuchman