If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.
BARBARA TUCHMANWhen commerce with Moslems flourished, zeal for their massacre declined.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
The Church [in the 14th century] gave ceremony and dignity to lives that had little of either. It was the source of beauty and art to which all had some access and which many helped to create.
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Wisdom – meaning judgment acting on experience, common sense, available knowledge, and a decent appreciation of probability.
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Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers – danger, death, and live ammunition.
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In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.
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It is wiser, I believe, to arrive at theory by way of evidence rather than the other way around…. It is more rewarding, in any case, to assemble the facts first and, in the process of arranging them in narrative form, to discover a theory or a historical generalization emerging of its own accord.
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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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[T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death.
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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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To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
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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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Friendship of a kind that cannot easily be reversed tomorrow must have its roots in common interests and shared beliefs.
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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.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
BARBARA TUCHMAN