Human behavior is timeless.
BARBARA TUCHMAN[T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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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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Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced
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For me, the card catalog has been a companion all my working life. To leave it is like leaving the house one was brought up in.
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If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.
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Diplomacy means all the wicked devices of the Old World, spheres of influence, balances of power, secret treaties, triple alliances, and, during the interim period, appeasement of Fascism.
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Government remains the paramount area of folly because it is there that men seek power over others – only to lose it over themselves.
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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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No less a bold and pugnacious figure than Winston Churchill broke down and was unable to finish his remarks at the sendoff of the British Expeditionary Force into the maelstrom of World War I in Europe.
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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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An essential element for good writing is a good ear: One must listen to the sound of one’s own prose.
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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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Human beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot.
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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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Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
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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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The power to command frequently causes failure to think.
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Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.
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Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
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Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence.
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Governments do not like to face radical remedies; it is easier to let politics predominate.
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To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
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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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Belgium, where there occurred one of the rare appearances of the hero in history, was lifted above herself by the uncomplicated conscience of her King and, faced with the choice to acquiesce or resist, took less than three hours to make her decision, knowing it might be mortal.
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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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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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That conflict between the reach for the divine and the lure of earthly things was to be the central problem of the Middle Ages.
BARBARA TUCHMAN