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.
BARBARA TUCHMANThe appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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Books are the carriers of civilization… Books are humanity in print.
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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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Books are humanity in print.
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Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.
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Governments do not like to face radical remedies; it is easier to let politics predominate.
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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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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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Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.
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If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.
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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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In the midst of events there is no perspective.
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Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.
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The reality of a question is inevitably more complicated than we would like to suppose.
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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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I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning to the end.
BARBARA TUCHMAN