A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.
BARBARA TUCHMANWhen truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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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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Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
bureaucracy, safely repeating today what it did yesterday, rolls on as ineluctably as some vast computer, which, once penetrated by error, duplicates it forever.
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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 Church [in the 14th century] gave ceremony and dignity to lives that had little of either. It was the source of beauty and art to which all had some access and which many helped to create.
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One must stop conducting research before one has finished. Otherwise, one will never stop and never finish.
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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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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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What his imagination is to the poet, facts are to the historian. His exercise of judgment comes in their selection, his art in their arrangement.
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Above all, discard the irrelevant.
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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.
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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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Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.
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Completeness is rare in history.
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The open frontier, the hardships of homesteading from scratch, the wealth of natural resources.
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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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Confronted by menace, or what is perceived as menace, governments will usually attempt to smash it, rarely to examine it, understand it, define it.
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Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible.
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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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Rome had Caesar, a man of remarkable governing talents, although it must be said that a ruler who arouses opponents to resort to assassination is probably not as smart as he ought to be.
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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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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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War is the unfolding of miscalculations.
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When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.
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To gain victory over the flesh was the purpose of fasting and celibacy, which denied the pleasures of this world for the sake of reward in the next.
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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