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The Hundred Years’ War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity.

Barbara Tuchman

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.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Art Exercise Imagination
The open frontier, the hardships of homesteading from scratch, the wealth of natural resources.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Challenges Money Waiting
Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Battle Military Mind
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.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Mean Power Secret
satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Exaggeration Reality Satire
In the midst of events there is no perspective.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Events Midst Perspective
Human beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Age Bad Time Needs
The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Action Appetite Power
Russians, in the knowledge of inexhaustible supplies of manpower, are accustomed to accepting gigantic fatalities with comparative calm.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Accepting Calm Supplies
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.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Husband Men Stories
If wisdom in government eludes us, perhaps courage could substitute-the moral courage to terminate mistakes.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Courage Elude Mistake
Friendship of a kind that cannot easily be reversed tomorrow must have its roots in common interests and shared beliefs.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Belief Friendship Roots
In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Contempt Country Law States United
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.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Poison Running War
Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Heels Jackals War
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

Despair Light Past

The Hundred Years’ War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity.

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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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Popular Authors

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