Human behavior is timeless.
BARBARA TUCHMANThe 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.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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Voluntary self-directed religion was more dangerous to the Church than any number of infidels.
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Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.
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Books are humanity in print.
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Business offers a kind of power, but only to the very successful at the top, and without the dominion and titles and red carpets and motorcycle escorts of public office.
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Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.
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Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
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In the search for meaning we must not forget that the gods (or God, for that matter) are a concept of the human mind; they are the creatures of man, not vice versa. They are needed and invented to give meaning and purpose to the struggle that is life on Earth.
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The power to command frequently causes failure to think.
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That the Jews were unholy was a belief so ingrained by the Church [by the 14th century] that the most devout persons were the harshest in their antipathy, none more so than St. Louis.
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Completeness is rare in history.
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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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Wisdom – meaning judgment acting on experience, common sense, available knowledge, and a decent appreciation of probability.
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Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence.
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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.
BARBARA TUCHMAN