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 TUCHMANTo put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.
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satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
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Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible.
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To put away one’s own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.
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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.
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If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements,corrupts even more.
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Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female.
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Books are humanity in print.
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The Germans could not get over the perfidy of it. It was unbelievable that the English, having degenerated to the stage where suffragettes heckled the Prime Minister and defied the police, were going to fight.
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More than a code of manners in war and love, Chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life.
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The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.
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Confronted by menace, or what is perceived as menace, governments will usually attempt to smash it, rarely to examine it, understand it, define it.
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Belgium, where there occurred one of the rare appearances of the hero in history, was lifted above herself by the uncomplicated conscience of her King and, faced with the choice to acquiesce or resist, took less than three hours to make her decision, knowing it might be mortal.
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[T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death.
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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.
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The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.
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Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
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Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.
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The clergy [in the 14th century] on the whole were probably no more lecherous or greedy or untrustworthy than other men, but because they were supposed to be better or nearer to God than other men, their failings attracted more attention.
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No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.
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In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.
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If wisdom in government eludes us, perhaps courage could substitute-the moral courage to terminate mistakes.
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To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.
BARBARA TUCHMAN -
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.
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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 -
No female iniquity was more severely condemned than the habit of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten the forehead.
BARBARA TUCHMAN