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The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard

Barbara Tuchman

To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Library Muse Shelter
The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Action Appetite Power
in the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Hindsight Midst War
Historians who stuff in every item of research they have found, every shoelace and telephone call of a biographical subject, are not doing the hard work of selecting and shaping a readable story.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Hard Stories Telephone Work
Wisdom – meaning judgment acting on experience, common sense, available knowledge, and a decent appreciation of probability.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Appreciation Common Sense Wisdom
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.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Exercise Passion Successful
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
Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Heels Jackals War
Books are humanity in print.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Book Humanity Print
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
Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Art Christianity Ideas
For most people reform meant relief from ecclesiastical extortions.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

People Reform relief
Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Satisfying Sentences Writing
The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

History People Poetry
Books are the carriers of civilization… Books are humanity in print.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Book Civilization Humanity
That the Jews were unholy was a belief so ingrained by the Church [by the 14th century] that the most devout persons were the harshest in their antipathy, none more so than St. Louis.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Belief Century Church

The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard

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The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard

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