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The power to command frequently causes failure to think.

Barbara Tuchman

The story and study of the past, both recent and distant, will not reveal the future, but it flashes beacon lights along the way and it is a useful nostrum against despair.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Despair Light Past
Modern historians have suggested that in his last years he (Richard II) was overtaken by mental disease, but that is only a modern view of the malfunction common to 14th century rulers: inability to inhibit impulse.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Disease Views Years
Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Faculty Learning Teaching
I have always been in a condition in which I cannot not write.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Always Condition Writer Writing
The open frontier, the hardships of homesteading from scratch, the wealth of natural resources.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Challenges Money Waiting
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
Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Battle Military Mind
The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

History People Poetry
In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Contempt Country Law States United
Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Female Males Sin
Doctrine tied itself into infinite knots over the realities of sex.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Doctrine Reality Sex
While husbands and lovers in the stories are of all kinds, ranging from sympathetic to disgusting, women are invariably deceivers: inconstant, unscrupulous, quarrelsome, querulous, lecherous, shameless, although not necessarily all of these at once.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Husband Men Stories
Russians, in the knowledge of inexhaustible supplies of manpower, are accustomed to accepting gigantic fatalities with comparative calm.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Accepting Calm Supplies
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
I have always felt like an artist when I work on a book. I see no reason why the word should always be confined to writers of fiction and poetry.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Artist Book Fiction Reason

The power to command frequently causes failure to think.

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The power to command frequently causes failure to think.

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