Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
BARBARA TUCHMANThe poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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in the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight
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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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Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.
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Friendship of a kind that cannot easily be reversed tomorrow must have its roots in common interests and shared beliefs.
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Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
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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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The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.
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We seem to be afflicted by a widespread and eroding reluctance to take any stand on any values, moral, behavioral or esthetic.
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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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The ills and disorders of the 14th century could not be without consequence. Times were to grow worse over the next fifty-odd years until at some imperceptible moment, by the some mysterious chemistry, energies were refreshed, ideas broke out of the mold of the Middle Ages into new realms, and humanity found itself redirected.
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Money was the crux. Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself.
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The clergy [in the 14th century] on the whole were probably no more lecherous or greedy or untrustworthy than other men, but because they were supposed to be better or nearer to God than other men, their failings attracted more attention.
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Woman was the Church’s rival, the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the Devil’s decoy.
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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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Doctrine tied itself into infinite knots over the realities of sex.
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Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced
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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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When people don’t have an objective, there’s much less dynamic effort, and that makes life a lot less interesting.
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If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.
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Books are humanity in print.
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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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Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
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I have always felt like an artist when I work on a book. I see no reason why the word should always be confined to writers of fiction and poetry.
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Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place.
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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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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.
BARBARA TUCHMAN