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Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.

Barbara Tuchman

One must stop conducting research before one has finished. Otherwise, one will never stop and never finish.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Conducting Finished Research
Of all the ills that our poor … society is heir to, the focal one, it seems to me, from which so much of our uneasiness and confusion derive, is the absence of standards.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Absence Confusion Heirs
Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Female Males Sin
The fleet sailed to its war base in the North Sea, headed not so much for some rendezvous with glory as for rendezvous with discretion.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

History Sea War
Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Book Civilization Literature History
Governments do not like to face radical remedies; it is easier to let politics predominate.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Easier Faces Government
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
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
To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Firsts Garment Legitimacy
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
Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Heels Jackals War
War is the unfolding of miscalculations.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Military Peace War
To be a bestseller is not necessarily a measure of quality, but it is a measure of communication.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Book Communication Quality
Friendship of a kind that cannot easily be reversed tomorrow must have its roots in common interests and shared beliefs.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Belief Friendship Roots
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
I ask myself, have nations ever declined from a loss of moral sense rather than from physical reasons or the pressure of barbarians? I think that they have.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Barbarians Loss Thinking

Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.

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Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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