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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.

Barbara Tuchman

To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Book Cooking Material Publish Two
The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

History People Poetry
Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Different Eye Honor
Books are the carriers of civilization… Books are humanity in print.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Book Civilization Humanity
The better part of valor is to spend it learning to live with differences, however hostile, unless and until we can find another planet.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Conflict Differences Planets
The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Action Appetite Power
No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Decision Faces Government
A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Government Periods Pursuit
The writer’s object is – or should be – to hold the reader’s attention.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Attention Object Reader
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
satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Exaggeration Reality Satire
bureaucracy, safely repeating today what it did yesterday, rolls on as ineluctably as some vast computer, which, once penetrated by error, duplicates it forever.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Errors Forever Yesterday
No nation in the world has so many drastic problems squeezed into so small a space, under such urgent pressure of time and heavy burden of history, as Israel.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Country Small Space Urgent World
Business offers a kind of power, but only to the very successful at the top, and without the dominion and titles and red carpets and motorcycle escorts of public office.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Dominion Kind Motorcycle Power Success
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
I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning to the end.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Pages Want Writing

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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