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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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Barbara Tuchman
Stories
Lights
Past
Flash
Light
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Beacon
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Despair
Beacons
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Flashes
Study
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Reveal

More quotes by 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.
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To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.
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While husbands and lovers in the stories are of all kinds, ranging from sympathetic to disgusting, women are invariably deceivers: inconstant, unscrupulous, quarrelsome, querulous, lecherous, shameless, although not necessarily all of these at once.
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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.
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Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
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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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To be a bestseller is not necessarily a measure of quality, but it is a measure of communication.
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The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
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Books are humanity in print.
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Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
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Above all, discard the irrelevant.
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Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
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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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Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced
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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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The Hundred Years' War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity.
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The writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention.
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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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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.
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