I have always been in a condition in which I cannot not write.
BARBARA TUCHMANBelgium, where there occurred one of the rare appearances of the hero in history, was lifted above herself by the uncomplicated conscience of her King and, faced with the choice to acquiesce or resist, took less than three hours to make her decision, knowing it might be mortal.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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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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satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
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When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.
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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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Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
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Voluntary self-directed religion was more dangerous to the Church than any number of infidels.
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The conduct of war was so much more interesting than its prevention.
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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.
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Books are humanity in print.
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Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
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No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.
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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.
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Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced
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In the midst of events there is no perspective.
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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.
BARBARA TUCHMAN






