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The power to command frequently causes failure to think.

Barbara Tuchman

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

Female Males Sin
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 better part of valor is to spend it learning to live with differences, however hostile, unless and until we can find another planet.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Conflict Differences Planets
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
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
If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Authority Common Should
When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Breaking Down Gaps Real
To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Library Muse Shelter
I have always been in a condition in which I cannot not write.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Always Condition Writer Writing
The ills and disorders of the 14th century could not be without consequence. Times were to grow worse over the next fifty-odd years until at some imperceptible moment, by the some mysterious chemistry, energies were refreshed, ideas broke out of the mold of the Middle Ages into new realms, and humanity found itself redirected.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Humanity Ideas Years
If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements,corrupts even more.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Compromise Power Weakness
The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Action Appetite Power
satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Exaggeration Reality Satire
If wisdom in government eludes us, perhaps courage could substitute-the moral courage to terminate mistakes.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Courage Elude Mistake
Human behavior is timeless.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Behavior Human Timeless

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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