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

Barbara Tuchman

Confronted by menace, or what is perceived as menace, governments will usually attempt to smash it, rarely to examine it, understand it, define it.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Confronted Government Menace Smash
When commerce with Moslems flourished, zeal for their massacre declined.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Commerce Massacres Zeal
The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Action Appetite Power
Books are the carriers of civilization… Books are humanity in print.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Book Civilization Humanity
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
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
That conflict between the reach for the divine and the lure of earthly things was to be the central problem of the Middle Ages.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Age Conflict Problem
Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as “the most flagrant of all the passions.” Because it can only be satisfied by power over others, government is its favorite field of exercise.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Exercise Passion Successful
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
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
To put away one’s own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Book Order Original Thought
Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Battle Military Mind
The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard
BARBARA TUCHMAN

History Past Tree
Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Different Eye Honor
An essential element for good writing is a good ear: One must listen to the sound of one’s own prose.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Essentials Sound Writing

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

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

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