The open frontier, the hardships of homesteading from scratch, the wealth of natural resources.
BARBARA TUCHMANWisdom – meaning judgment acting on experience, common sense, available knowledge, and a decent appreciation of probability.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.
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Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
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The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
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Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex.
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For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use.
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Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
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When commerce with Moslems flourished, zeal for their massacre declined.
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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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No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.
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The reality of a question is inevitably more complicated than we would like to suppose.
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The fact of being reported increases the apparent extent of a deplorable development by a factor of ten.
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The whole vast challenge of a continent waiting to be exploited, combined to produce a prevailing materialism and an American drive bent as much, if not more, on money, property, and power than was true of the Old World from which we had fled.
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If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.
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The better part of valor is to spend it learning to live with differences, however hostile, unless and until we can find another planet.
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The social damage was not in the failure but in the undertaking, which was expensive. The cost of war was the poison running through the 14th century.
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Doctrine tied itself into infinite knots over the realities of sex.
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The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.
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Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as “the most flagrant of all the passions.” Because it can only be satisfied by power over others, government is its favorite field of exercise.
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They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.
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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.
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Books are humanity in print.
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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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Voluntary self-directed religion was more dangerous to the Church than any number of infidels.
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For most people reform meant relief from ecclesiastical extortions.
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Completeness is rare in history.
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In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.
BARBARA TUCHMAN