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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

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
Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Revolution Successful Tyrants
in the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Hindsight Midst War
The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

History People Poetry
The conduct of war was so much more interesting than its prevention.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Interesting Prevention War
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
Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Art Christianity Ideas
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
Human behavior is timeless.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Behavior Human Timeless
The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Communism Communist Myth
Books are the carriers of civilization… Books are humanity in print.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Book Civilization Humanity
It is wiser, I believe, to arrive at theory by way of evidence rather than the other way around…. It is more rewarding, in any case, to assemble the facts first and, in the process of arranging them in narrative form, to discover a theory or a historical generalization emerging of its own accord.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Atheism Believe Historical
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
No nation in the world has so many drastic problems squeezed into so small a space, under such urgent pressure of time and heavy burden of history, as Israel.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Country Small Space Urgent World
Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Eradicable Matter Sex Sin
Human beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Age Bad Time Needs

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.

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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.

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Popular Authors

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