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[T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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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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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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Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
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When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
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I have always been in a condition in which I cannot not write.
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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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No female iniquity was more severely condemned than the habit of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten the forehead.
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I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning to the end.
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The power to command frequently causes failure to think.
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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.
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More than a code of manners in war and love, Chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life.
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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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They 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.
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Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
BARBARA TUCHMAN