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Human behavior is timeless.

Barbara Tuchman

Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Faculty Learning Teaching
[T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Century Emotion Pain
Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Argument Desire Found
An essential element for good writing is a good ear: One must listen to the sound of one’s own prose.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Essentials Sound Writing
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.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Poison Running War
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
Above all, discard the irrelevant.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Discard Irrelevant Matters
To put away one’s own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Book Order Original Thought
No female iniquity was more severely condemned than the habit of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten the forehead.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Eyebrows Female Habit
Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Female Males Sin
To be right and overruled is not forgiven to persons in responsible positions.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Forgiven Position Responsible
Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Closing Doors Library
Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Book Civilization Development Impossible
Words are seductive and dangerous material, to be used with caution.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Dangerous Seductive Used
Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Heels Jackals War
The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Action Appetite Power

Human behavior is timeless.

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Human behavior is timeless.

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