American - Historian | January 30, 1912 - February 6, 1989
War is the unfolding of miscalculations.
Barbara W. Tuchman
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Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.
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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.
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To put away one's own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.
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No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.
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Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip.
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The writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention.
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If a man is a writer, everybody tiptoes around past the locked door of the breadwinner. But if you're an ordinary female housewife, people say, 'This is just something Barbara wanted to do; it's not professional.'
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After the war, when my husband came home, we had two more children, and domesticity for a while prevailed combined with beginning the work I had always wanted to do, which was writing a book.
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When the children were very small, I worked in the morning only, and then gradually, as they spent full days at school, I could spend full days at work.
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