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3ac5ba3
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That the mortality was accepted as God's punishment may explain in part the vacuum of comment that followed the Black Death. An investigator has noticed that in the archives of Perigord references to the war are innumerable, to the plague few. Froissart mentions the great death but once, Chaucer gives it barely a glance. Divine anger so great that it contemplated the extermination of man did not bear close examination.
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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c16d9af
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Clausewitz, a dead Prussian, and Norman Angell, a living if misunderstood professor, had combined to fasten the short-war concept upon the European mind. Quick, decisive victory was the German orthodoxy;
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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300139f
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Government was rarely more than a choice between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
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realism
strategy
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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dbee9b1
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What proportion of the peasantry was well off and what poor is judged by what they bequeathed, and since the poorest had nothing to leave, they remain mute. For no other class is that famous goal of the historian, wie es wirklich war (how it really was), so elusive.
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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389a8bf
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Command, deprived of personal judgment, can win no battles.
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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0585c42
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Diplomacy's primary law: LEAVE ROOM FOR NEGOTIATION.
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overreaction
statesmanship
persuasion
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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36297b6
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Survivors of the plague, finding themselves neither destroyed nor improved, could discover no Divine purpose in the pain they had suffered. God's purposes were usually mysterious, but this scourge had been too terrible to be accepted without questioning. If a disaster of such magnitude, the most lethal ever known, was a mere wanton act of God or perhaps not God's work at all, then the absolutes of a fixed order were loosed from their moorin..
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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9fcaadc
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The only really detestable character in Chaucer's company of Canterbury pilgrims is the Pardoner with his stringy locks, his eunuch's hairless skin, his glaring eyes like a hare's, and his brazen acknowledgment of the tricks and deceits of his trade.
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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8ce353c
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His only weakness was the habit of prophesying war within the next fortnight. George Bernard Shaw
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word-choice
tone
conspiracy
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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c4a811a
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Confronted by menace or what is perceived as menace, governments will usually attempt to smash it, rarely to examine it, understand it, and drefine it.
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leadership
statecraft
pride
strategy
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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e0e6a48
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Irritability was an occupational disease. Intolerant and intolerable belong in the same category.
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peer-pressure
job
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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b347cbf
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To "establish despotism over such a mighty nation must be vain, must be fatal. We shall be forced ultimately to retreat: let us retreat when we can, not when we must."
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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63e337e
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To plunge into passionate dispute over the trivialities of so-called honor is a queerer but not uncommon gambit of men who have just come from putting their lives at stake in serious combat,
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returning-soldier
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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49d5c2d
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Extravagant sartorial display had a purpose. It created the impression of wealth and power on the opponent and pride in the wearer which has been lost sight of in our nervously egalitarian times.
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impression
military
image
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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f319ee4
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John Quincy Adams' dictum that wherever the standard of liberty was unfurled in the world, "there will be America's heart ... but she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy."
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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4dbdbf5
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The writer of history, I believe, has a number of duties vis-a-vis the reader, if he wants to keep him reading. The first is to distill. He must do the preliminary work for the reader, assemble the information, make sense of it, select the essential, discard the irrelevant- above all, discard the irrelevant - and put the rest together so that it forms a developing dramatic narrative. Narrative, it has been said , is the lifeblood of history..
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politics
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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8578a81
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double et louche (a provocative phrase which could mean "double and squinting" or "equivocal" or "shady" in the sense of disreputable)."
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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a2d2236
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nothing to learning for I have none; nothing to youth for I was old when I began; nothing to popularity for I was hated all round.... This is the modest truth and my friends at Rome call me more god than man.
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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f049c0c
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Those deterrents--the brotherhood of socialists, the interlocking of finance, commerce, and other economic factors--which had been expected to make war impossible failed to function when the time came. Nationhood, like a wild gust of wind, arose and swept them aside. People
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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79da27c
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The cracking of old and famous structures is slow and internal, while the facade holds.
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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2a0d25b
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The occasions when an individual is able to harness a nation are memorable, and Grey's speech proved to be one of those junctures by which people afterward date events.
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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3336700
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The daughter is the goddess, separately or together, of Infatuation, Mischief, Delusion and Blind Folly, rendering her victims "incapable of rational choice" and blind to distinctions of morality and expedience." --
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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7103109
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Contradictory conditions are always present. Evidence
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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734c946
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Character is fate, the Greeks believed. A hundred years of German philosophy went into the making of this decision in which the seed of self-destruction lay embedded, waiting for its hour. The voice was Schlieffen's, but the hand was the hand of Fichte who saw the German people chosen by Providence to occupy the supreme place in the history of the universe, of Hegel who saw them leading the world to a glorious destiny of compulsory Kultur, ..
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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8c9d2d0
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German soldiers, posted as informers, were found dressed as peasants, even as peasant women. The latter were discovered, presumably in the course of non-military action, by their government issued underwear; but many were probably never caught, it being impossible, General Gourko regretfully admitted, to lift the skirts of every female in East Prussia.
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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81ff508
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The impetus of existing plans is always stronger than the impulse to change. The Kaiser could not change Moltke's plan nor could Kitchener alter Henry Wilson's nor Lanrezac alter Joffre's.
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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7f55e27
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the Home Secretary, a young man of thirty-seven, impossible to ignore, who, from his inappropriate post, had pelted the Prime Minister during the crisis with ideas on naval and military strategy, all of them quite sound, had produced an astonishingly accurate prediction of the future course of the fighting, and who had no doubts whatever about what needed to be done. The Home Secretary was Winston Churchill.
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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dccae54
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Nineteenth-century liberalism had assumed that man was a rational being who operated naturally according to his own best interests, so that in the end, what was reasonable would prevail. On this principle liberals defended extension of the suffrage toward the goal of one man, one vote. But a rise in literacy and in the right to vote, as the event proved, did nothing to increase common sense in politics. The mob that is moved by waving the b..
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politics
liberalism
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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ee7f544
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Now according to German logic, a declaration of war was found to be unnecessary because of imaginary bombings
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humour
worldwar-i
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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a7f21d4
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If it was bliss to be alive, to hunt was rapture.
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ministry
distraction
vocation
job
focus
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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96f0406
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Eventually the United States became the latter arsenal and bank of the allies, and acquired a direct interest in allied victory that was to bemuse the post war apostles of economic determinism for a long time.
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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174904c
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To think meant to give room for freedom of initiative, for the imponderable to win over the material, for will to demonstrate its power over circumstance.
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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83399a2
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The French right wing, opening the offensive into German-occupied Lorraine, took an old embattled path like so many in France and Belgium where, century after century, whatever the power that makes men fight brought legions tramping down the same roads, leveling the same villages.
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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58babaf
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He accomplished wonders of diplomacy on the principle, never give way, and never give offense.
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manners
focus
politeness
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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d9c77b1
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I command, or I keep quiet." Napoleon"
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self-discipline
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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ff8b346
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No single characteristic ever overtakes an entire society.
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overgeneralization
remnant
culture
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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b4a9fb3
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For his son-in-law the Pope suffered no further spasms of morality. Rather, judging from Burchard's diary, the last inhibitions, if any, dropped away. Two months after Alfonso's death, the Pope presided over a banquet given by Cesare in the Vatican, famous in the annals of pornography as the Ballet of the Chestnuts. Soberly recorded by Burchard, fifty courtesans danced after dinner with the guests, "at first clothed, then naked." Chestnuts ..
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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a09bb11
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the thing you contend for to be reason," Burke had said, "show it to be common sense, show it to be the means of attaining some useful end, and then I am content to allow it what dignity you please."
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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6e9f48f
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If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us!" lamented Samuel Coleridge. "But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern which shines only on the waves behind us." The image is beautiful but"
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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a6171de
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In writing I am seduced by the sound of words and by the interaction of their sound and sense.
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writing-process
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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e7c5186
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Despised as ineffective, they were ineffective because they were despised.
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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b13d147
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Within the army, field officers despised Staff officers as "having the brains of canaries and the manners of Potsdam," but both groups were as one in their distaste for interference by civilian ministers who were known as "the frocks." The civil arm in its turn referred to the military as "the boneheads."
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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af0e490
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fireflies were the souls of unbaptized dead infants.
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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46626b6
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with that characteristic touch of late-Romanov rashness, the government, by ukase of August 22, extended prohibition for the duration of the war. As the sale of vodka was a state monopoly, this act at one stroke cut off a third of the government's income. It was well known, commented a bewildered member of the Duma, that governments waging war seek by a variety of taxes and levies to increase income, "but never since the dawn of history has..
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Barbara W. Tuchman |