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If wisdom in government eludes us, perhaps courage could substitute-the moral courage to terminate mistakes.

Barbara Tuchman

To explain strange and irregular phenomena of nature, haphazard events and, above all, irrational human conduct. They exist to bear the burden of all things that cannot be comprehended except by supernatural intervention or design.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Conduct Human Irrational Phenomena Strange
Books are humanity in print.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Book Humanity Print
War is the unfolding of miscalculations.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Military Peace War
Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Different Eye Honor
Confronted by menace, or what is perceived as menace, governments will usually attempt to smash it, rarely to examine it, understand it, define it.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Confronted Government Menace Smash
To be a bestseller is not necessarily a measure of quality, but it is a measure of communication.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Book Communication Quality
The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Action Appetite Power
The writer’s object is – or should be – to hold the reader’s attention.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Attention Object Reader
More than a code of manners in war and love, Chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Knighthood Love War
Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Argument Desire Found
[T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Century Emotion Pain
If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements,corrupts even more.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Compromise Power Weakness
Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Satisfying Sentences Writing
The Hundred Years’ War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Unity War Years
Government remains the paramount area of folly because it is there that men seek power over others – only to lose it over themselves.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Folly Men Power
In the midst of events there is no perspective.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Events Midst Perspective

If wisdom in government eludes us, perhaps courage could substitute-the moral courage to terminate mistakes.

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If wisdom in government eludes us, perhaps courage could substitute-the moral courage to terminate mistakes.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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