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One must stop conducting research before one has finished. Otherwise, one will never stop and never finish.

Barbara Tuchman

Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Disaster Facts Records
A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Government Periods Pursuit
bureaucracy, safely repeating today what it did yesterday, rolls on as ineluctably as some vast computer, which, once penetrated by error, duplicates it forever.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Errors Forever Yesterday
Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers – danger, death, and live ammunition.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Danger Ingredients Missing
When people don’t have an objective, there’s much less dynamic effort, and that makes life a lot less interesting.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Effort Interesting People
To be right and overruled is not forgiven to persons in responsible positions.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Forgiven Position Responsible
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.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Mean Power Secret
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
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.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Capitalist Economy Sin Usury
The power to command frequently causes failure to think.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Cause Command Thinking
War is the unfolding of miscalculations.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Military Peace War
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.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Cost Pay War
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
Governments do not like to face radical remedies; it is easier to let politics predominate.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Easier Faces Government
The Hundred Years’ War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Unity War Years
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 TUCHMAN

Cards House Leaving

One must stop conducting research before one has finished. Otherwise, one will never stop and never finish.

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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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Popular Authors

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