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Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.

Barbara Tuchman

The fleet sailed to its war base in the North Sea, headed not so much for some rendezvous with glory as for rendezvous with discretion.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

History Sea War
More than a code of manners in war and love, Chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Knighthood Love War
What his imagination is to the poet, facts are to the historian. His exercise of judgment comes in their selection, his art in their arrangement.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Art Exercise Imagination
Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Faculty Learning Teaching
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.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Husband Men Stories
One constant among the elements of 1914—as of any era—was the disposition of everyone on all sides not to prepare for the harder alternative, not to act upon what they suspected to be true.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Alternatives Elements Eras
I have always been in a condition in which I cannot not write.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Always Condition Writer Writing
To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Library Muse Shelter
The ills and disorders of the 14th century could not be without consequence. Times were to grow worse over the next fifty-odd years until at some imperceptible moment, by the some mysterious chemistry, energies were refreshed, ideas broke out of the mold of the Middle Ages into new realms, and humanity found itself redirected.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Humanity Ideas Years
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Book Reading Stupid
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
Human behavior is timeless.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Behavior Human Timeless
To gain victory over the flesh was the purpose of fasting and celibacy, which denied the pleasures of this world for the sake of reward in the next.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Fasting Purpose Victory
Voluntary self-directed religion was more dangerous to the Church than any number of infidels.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Church Numbers Self
For most people reform meant relief from ecclesiastical extortions.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

People Reform relief
In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Historical History Peace

Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.

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Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.

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