Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
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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[T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death.
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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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Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced
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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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Completeness is rare in history.
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in the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight
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When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.
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The reality of a question is inevitably more complicated than we would like to suppose.
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To put away one’s own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.
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The Church [in the 14th century] gave ceremony and dignity to lives that had little of either. It was the source of beauty and art to which all had some access and which many helped to create.
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No economic activity was more irrepressible [in the 14th century] than the investment and lending at interest of money; it was the basis for the rise of the Western capitalist economy and the building of private fortunes-and it was based on the sin of usury.
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While husbands and lovers in the stories are of all kinds, ranging from sympathetic to disgusting, women are invariably deceivers: inconstant, unscrupulous, quarrelsome, querulous, lecherous, shameless, although not necessarily all of these at once.
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Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
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If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.
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Governments do not like to face radical remedies; it is easier to let politics predominate.
BARBARA TUCHMAN