Completeness is rare in history.
BARBARA TUCHMANFateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.
More Barbara Tuchman Quotes
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To be a bestseller is not necessarily a measure of quality, but it is a measure of communication.
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Doctrine tied itself into infinite knots over the realities of sex.
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For me, the card catalog has been a companion all my working life. To leave it is like leaving the house one was brought up in.
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I have always been in a condition in which I cannot not write.
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The conduct of war was so much more interesting than its prevention.
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Wisdom – meaning judgment acting on experience, common sense, available knowledge, and a decent appreciation of probability.
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Human behavior is timeless.
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Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
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in the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight
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The writer’s object is – or should be – to hold the reader’s attention.
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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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Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex.
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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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bureaucracy, safely repeating today what it did yesterday, rolls on as ineluctably as some vast computer, which, once penetrated by error, duplicates it forever.
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Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
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No female iniquity was more severely condemned than the habit of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten the forehead.
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Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
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No economic activity was more irrepressible [in the 14th century] than the investment and lending at interest of money; it was the basis for the rise of the Western capitalist economy and the building of private fortunes-and it was based on the sin of usury.
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Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence.
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The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.
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Rome had Caesar, a man of remarkable governing talents, although it must be said that a ruler who arouses opponents to resort to assassination is probably not as smart as he ought to be.
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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.
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Books are humanity in print.
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Human beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot.
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Historians who stuff in every item of research they have found, every shoelace and telephone call of a biographical subject, are not doing the hard work of selecting and shaping a readable story.
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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.
BARBARA TUCHMAN