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 TUCHMANStrong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government, and when combined with a position of power even more so.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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Human behavior is timeless.
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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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That conflict between the reach for the divine and the lure of earthly things was to be the central problem of the Middle Ages.
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The power to command frequently causes failure to think.
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Doctrine tied itself into infinite knots over the realities of sex.
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Woman was the Church’s rival, the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the Devil’s decoy.
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Diplomacy means all the wicked devices of the Old World, spheres of influence, balances of power, secret treaties, triple alliances, and, during the interim period, appeasement of Fascism.
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No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.
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Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers – danger, death, and live ammunition.
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To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
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Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
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Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female.
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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.
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When commerce with Moslems flourished, zeal for their massacre declined.
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Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
BARBARA TUCHMAN