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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
Finished
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Stop
Must
Never
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More quotes by Barbara Tuchman

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Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.
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The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.
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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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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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More than a code of manners in war and love, Chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life.
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Friendship of a kind that cannot easily be reversed tomorrow must have its roots in common interests and shared beliefs.
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In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.
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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.
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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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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 They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.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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To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.
Barbara Tuchman
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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.
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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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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Belgium, where there occurred one of the rare appearances of the hero in history, was lifted above herself by the uncomplicated conscience of her King and, faced with the choice to acquiesce or resist, took less than three hours to make her decision, knowing it might be mortal.
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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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
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Completeness is rare in history.
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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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