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 TUCHMANWhen truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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The open frontier, the hardships of homesteading from scratch, the wealth of natural resources.
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I have always been in a condition in which I cannot not write.
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The Germans could not get over the perfidy of it. It was unbelievable that the English, having degenerated to the stage where suffragettes heckled the Prime Minister and defied the police, were going to fight.
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Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
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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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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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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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Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
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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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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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Books are humanity in print.
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Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
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The nastiness of women [in the 14th century] was generally perceived at the close of life when a man began to worry about hell, and his sexual desire in any case fading.
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Above all, discard the irrelevant.
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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.
BARBARA TUCHMAN