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Words are seductive and dangerous material, to be used with caution.

Barbara Tuchman

To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Firsts Garment Legitimacy
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
Of all the ills that our poor … society is heir to, the focal one, it seems to me, from which so much of our uneasiness and confusion derive, is the absence of standards.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Absence Confusion Heirs
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
Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Female Males Sin
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
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
To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Library Muse Shelter
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
The power to command frequently causes failure to think.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Cause Command Thinking
No less a bold and pugnacious figure than Winston Churchill broke down and was unable to finish his remarks at the sendoff of the British Expeditionary Force into the maelstrom of World War I in Europe.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

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

Easier Faces Government
Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Art Christianity Ideas
Business offers a kind of power, but only to the very successful at the top, and without the dominion and titles and red carpets and motorcycle escorts of public office.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Dominion Kind Motorcycle Power Success
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
War is the unfolding of miscalculations.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Military Peace War

Words are seductive and dangerous material, to be used with caution.

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Words are seductive and dangerous material, to be used with caution.

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Popular Authors

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