For me, the card catalog has been a companion all my working life. To leave it is like leaving the house one was brought up in.
BARBARA TUCHMANin the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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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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The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.
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Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence.
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Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
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Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible.
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The Hundred Years’ War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity.
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Books are humanity in print.
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In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.
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Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip.
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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.
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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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Governments do not like to face radical remedies; it is easier to let politics predominate.
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The story and study of the past, both recent and distant, will not reveal the future, but it flashes beacon lights along the way and it is a useful nostrum against despair.
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When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.
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Whatever solace the Christian faith could give was balanced by the anxiety it generated.
BARBARA TUCHMAN