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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

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

Doctrine Reality Sex
Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Revolution Successful Tyrants
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Book Reading Stupid
Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Argument Desire Found
If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Authority Common Should
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
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
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

Conduct Human Irrational Phenomena Strange
No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Decision Faces Government
The Church [in the 14th century] gave ceremony and dignity to lives that had little of either. It was the source of beauty and art to which all had some access and which many helped to create.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Art Church Little
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
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
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.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Absence Confusion Heirs
Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Battle Military Mind
I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning to the end.
BARBARA TUCHMAN

Pages Want Writing

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.

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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.

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Popular Authors

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