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The reality of a question is inevitably more complicated than we would like to suppose.

Barbara Tuchman

In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Historical History Peace
Money was the crux. Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Cost Pay War
Government remains the paramount area of folly because it is there that men seek power over others – only to lose it over themselves.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Folly Men Power
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.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Hero Kings Knowing
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
I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning to the end.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Pages Want Writing
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.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Fighting History Police
Governments do not like to face radical remedies; it is easier to let politics predominate.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Easier Faces Government
For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Purpose Technology Use
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.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Alternatives Elements Eras
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
No female iniquity was more severely condemned than the habit of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten the forehead.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Eyebrows Female Habit
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
Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Disaster Facts Records
Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Book Civilization Development Impossible
[T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Century Emotion Pain
The nastiness of women [in the 14th century] was generally perceived at the close of life when a man began to worry about hell, and his sexual desire in any case fading.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Desire Women Worry
satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Exaggeration Reality Satire
in the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Hindsight Midst War
A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Government Periods Pursuit
Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Closing Doors Library
What his imagination is to the poet, facts are to the historian. His exercise of judgment comes in their selection, his art in their arrangement.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Art Exercise Imagination
Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Satisfying Sentences Writing
Friendship of a kind that cannot easily be reversed tomorrow must have its roots in common interests and shared beliefs.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Belief Friendship Roots
Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Battle Military Mind
In the search for meaning we must not forget that the gods (or God, for that matter) are a concept of the human mind; they are the creatures of man, not vice versa. They are needed and invented to give meaning and purpose to the struggle that is life on Earth.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Giving Men Struggle
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.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Dying Sunset World

The reality of a question is inevitably more complicated than we would like to suppose.

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The reality of a question is inevitably more complicated than we would like to suppose.

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