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Historians who stuff in every item of research they have found, every shoelace and telephone call of a biographical subject, are not doing the hard work of selecting and shaping a readable story.

Barbara Tuchman

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More quotes by 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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Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
Barbara Tuchman
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Above all, discard the irrelevant.
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The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
Barbara Tuchman
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To be a bestseller is not necessarily a measure of quality, but it is a measure of communication.
Barbara Tuchman
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Human behavior is timeless.
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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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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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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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Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced
Barbara Tuchman
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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.
Barbara Tuchman
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Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
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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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.
Barbara Tuchman
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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
Barbara Tuchman
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If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.
Barbara Tuchman
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The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.
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 put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.
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