The power to command frequently causes failure to think.
BARBARA TUCHMANThey 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.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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The Germans could not get over the perfidy of it. It was unbelievable that the English, having degenerated to the stage where suffragettes heckled the Prime Minister and defied the police, were going to fight.
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Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence.
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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.
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If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements,corrupts even more.
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Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
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Wisdom – meaning judgment acting on experience, common sense, available knowledge, and a decent appreciation of probability.
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The Hundred Years’ War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity.
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When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.
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Above all, discard the irrelevant.
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Money was the crux. Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself.
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Modern historians have suggested that in his last years he (Richard II) was overtaken by mental disease, but that is only a modern view of the malfunction common to 14th century rulers: inability to inhibit impulse.
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The social damage was not in the failure but in the undertaking, which was expensive. The cost of war was the poison running through the 14th century.
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satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
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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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Human behavior is timeless.
BARBARA TUCHMAN