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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
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Beacons
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Study
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More quotes by Barbara Tuchman

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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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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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Modern historians have suggested that in his last years he (Richard II) was overtaken by mental disease, but that is only a modern view of the malfunction common to 14th century rulers: inability to inhibit impulse.
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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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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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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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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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No female iniquity was more severely condemned than the habit of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten the forehead.
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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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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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Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
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Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.
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Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
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.
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The writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention.
Barbara Tuchman
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Human behavior is timeless.
Barbara Tuchman
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Books are humanity in print.
Barbara Tuchman
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I ask myself, have nations ever declined from a loss of moral sense rather than from physical reasons or the pressure of barbarians? I think that they have.
Barbara Tuchman