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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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Barbara Tuchman
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More quotes by Barbara Tuchman

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Books are humanity in print.
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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 female iniquity was more severely condemned than the habit of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten the forehead.
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If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.
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To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.
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When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.
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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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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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To be a bestseller is not necessarily a measure of quality, but it is a measure of communication.
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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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To be right and overruled is not forgiven to persons in responsible positions.
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Human behavior is timeless.
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Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
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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.
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To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
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Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
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Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
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The writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention.
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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.
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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.
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